“If you’ll take me as a pupil,” she said, “I’d like to begin immediately.”

“Let me try your voice,” he proposed.  He went to the piano, and there his manner had soon changed.  From genial and curious it grew interested.  He spoke rather sharply, asking her to do this and that, and she felt as though she were being probed.  “You have a voice,” he said, at the end.  “Not a world shaker,” he added, smiling, “but one that interests me a lot.”  She beamed on him.

“You’ll take me, then?”

“Assuredly.”

“Oh, that’s so nice.”  They decided on the time for her lessons.  Then she glanced at her wrist watch.  “Will you see if my car is waiting!” she asked.  “I had him take the nurse and baby up to the Park—­and he ought to be back by now, I think.”  But as Dwight went to the telephone, she added excitedly to herself, “Now if that idiot of a chauffeur is as late as I told him to be, you and I will have quite a talk, Mr. Dwight.”

“It isn’t here yet,” he informed her.

“Oh, I’m so sorry.  I’ll have to walk.”  She smiled and held out her hand to him.  “Will you send the chauffeur home!”

“If you like,” he replied good-humouredly.  “But I’d much rather you’d wait here—­if you have nothing pressing.”  And as she hesitated, “It’s not only your voice, you know—­I used to be quite a friend of Joe’s.”

“Oh, yes, I remember his telling me.  Over in Paris, wasn’t it?”

Soon they were talking easily.  Dwight had lit a cigarette, and Ethel could see he was studying her.  She tried to look unconscious.

“I’ve wanted to go to Paris all my life,” she told him.  “How long is it since you left?”

“Only a year.”  She looked at him.

“Is there a Paris in New York?”

“I’m not sure yet—­I’m new, you see.”

“So am I,” she confided frankly.  And at that he gave her a swift glance which made Ethel add to herself, “Yes, he could be very personal.”

She asked him what he had found in New York as a contrast, coming from abroad.  She spoke of the high buildings here, and from that she passed quite naturally to her husband’s business.

“It isn’t the work I’d like for him,” she said with a regretful sigh.  “Joe is getting to be like all the rest—­he’s making too much money.”  She waited a moment and added, “I should so like him to be as he was when you knew him.”

“I’ll be curious to see how he has changed.  You must let me see him,” Dwight replied.

“Why yes, of course.”

“Over in Paris he had so much.  He was such a wonderful lad for dreams—­with the most exuberant fancy in the way he used to talk of New York and what he wanted to do back here—­to use the backyards and the roofs and turn them into gardens.  This town, when Joe got through with it—­well, from an aeroplane it was to look more or less like a bed of roses—­or a hill town in Italy.  But that was only his lighter vein.  When his fancy was really, working hard, he took department stores, hotels and huge railroad terminals and jammed them all together into one big building.  How deep in the earth it was to have gone I really can’t remember, nor how far up into the skies.  But there was a garden at the top—­or a meadow or prairie or something.”