“I’m not bored,” he said, “I’m merely puzzled.”

“Oh, I know,” Gerty nodded, “but you’ll get over it.  I puzzle everybody at first, but it doesn’t last because I’m really as clear as running water.  My gayety and my good spirits are but the joys of flippancy, you see.”

“I don’t see,” protested Trent, his eyes warming.

She laughed softly, as if rather pleased than otherwise by the frankness of his admiration.  “You haven’t lost as yet the divine faith of youth,” she said, carelessly flicking the ashes of her cigarette upon the little table at her elbow.  Then, tossing the burned end into a silver tray, she pushed it from her with a decisive movement.  “I’ve had six,” she observed, “and that’s my limit.”

“What I’m trying to understand,” confessed Trent, leaning forward in his earnestness, “is why you should care so greatly for Miss Wilde?”

Gerty flashed up suddenly from her cushions.  “And pray why shouldn’t I?” she demanded.

“Because,” he hesitated an instant and then advanced with the audacity born of ignorance, “you’re as much alike as a thrush and a paroquet.”

She laughed again.

“So you consider me a paroquet?”

“In comparison with Laura Wilde.”

“Well, I’d have said a canary,” she remarked indulgently, “but we’ll let it pass.  I don’t see though,” she serenely continued, “why a paroquet shouldn’t have a feeling for a thrush?”

He shook his head, smiling.  “It seems a bit odd, that’s all.”

“Then, if it’s any interest to you to know it,” pursued Gerty, with a burst of confidence, “I’d walk across Brooklyn Bridge, every step of the way, on my knees for Laura.  That’s because I believe in her,” she wound up emphatically, “and because, too, I don’t happen to believe much in anybody else.”

“So you know her well?”

“I went to school with her and I adored her then, but I adore her even more to-day.  Somehow she always seems to be knocking for the good in one, and it has to come out at last because she stands so patiently and waits.  She makes me over every time she meets me, shapes me after some ideal image of me she has in her brain, and then I’m filled with desperate shame if I don’t seem at least a little bit to correspond with it.”

“I understand,” said Trent slowly; “one feels her as one feels a strong wind on a high mountain.  There’s a wonderful bigness about her.”

“It’s because she’s different,” explained Gerty, “she’s kept so apart from life that she knows it only in its elemental freshness—­she has a kind of instinct for truth just as she has for poetry or for beauty, and our little quibbles, our incessant inanities have never troubled her at all.”

The servant entered with a card as she finished, and after reading the name she made a quick movement of interest.

“Ask him to come up,” she said to the man, adding immediately as Trent rose to go, “it’s Arnold Kemper.  Will you stay and see him?”