“They’ll be narrow at the feet but very bunchy at the top—­doesn’t that sound delightful?  I am making a white taffeta for Fanny that has five or six yards of perfectly good material puffed out in the most ridiculous way at the back over a petticoat of silver lace.”

Her spirits felt so light, so effervescent, that she wanted to jest, to laugh, to talk nonsense interminably; and after his first moments of bewilderment, when he appeared still unable to detach his mind from his business, he entered gaily and heartily into her mood.  His perplexities once disposed of, he gave himself entirely to the enjoyment of the walk with her, and she noticed for the first time his boyish delight in the simplest details of life.  With the simplicity of a man to whom large pleasures are unknown, he threw himself whole-heartedly into the momentary diversion of small ones.  Every person in the crowd, she discovered, excited his interest, and his humour bubbled over at the most insignificant things—­at the grimace of a newsboy who offered him a paper, at the absurd hat worn by a woman in a motor car, at the expression of disgusted solemnity on the face of a servant in livery, at the giggles of an over-dressed girl who hung on the arm of an anemic and exhausted admirer.  Never before had she encountered such vitality, such careless, pure, and uncalculating joy of life.  There was a tonic quality in his physical presence, and while she walked at his side down Fifth Avenue she felt as if she were swept onward by one of the health-giving, pine-scented winds of Colorado.  And she told herself reassuringly that only a man who had lived decently could have kept himself so extraordinarily young and exuberant at forty-five.

The shop windows, particularly those displaying men’s shirtings, enchanted him; and he stopped a moment before each one, while she yielded as obligingly as she might have yielded to a fancy of Archibald’s, though she was aware that her son would have scorned to look into a window.

“It’s so seldom I get out on the Avenue, that’s why I like it, I suppose,” he remarked while they were surveying a festive arrangement of pink madras.

She smiled up at him, and her smile, gay as it was, held a touch of maternal solicitude.  Notwithstanding his bigness and his success and his forty-five years, there was something appealingly boyish about him.

“It would be so easy to get out, wouldn’t it?” she asked as they walked on again.

“Well, there ain’t much fun when you are by yourself.”

“But you know plenty of people.”

“Oh, yes, I know people enough in a business way, but that don’t mean having friends, does it?  Of course, I’ve men friends scattered everywhere,” he added.  “The West is full of ’em, but it’s funny when you come to think of it—­” He broke off, hesitated an instant, and then went on again:  “It’s funny, but I don’t believe.  I ever had a woman friend in my life—­I mean a friend who wasn’t just the wife of some man I knew in business.”