After his presentation to Aunt Isabelle, he said, smiling: 

“And there was another touch—­the big gray pussy cat.  She was in the window-seat, and when I sat down to look at the lights, she tucked her head under my hand and sang to me.”

“Pittiwitz?  Oh, Aunt Isabelle, we left Pittiwitz up there.  She claims your room as hers,” she explained to Roger.  “We’ve had her for years.  And she was always there with father, and then with Constance and me.  If she’s a bother, just put her on the back stairs and she will come down.”

“But she isn’t a bother.  It is very pleasant to have something alive to bear me company.”

The moment that his remark was made he was afraid that she might interpret it as a plea for companionship.  And he had no right——­ What earthly right had he to expect to enter this charmed circle?

Susan Jenks came in with her arms full of wraps.  “Mr. Porter’s coming,” she said, “and it’s eight o’clock now.”

“We are going out——­” Mary was interested to note that her lodger had taken Aunt Isabelle’s wrap, and was putting her into it without self-consciousness.

Her own wrap was of a shimmering gray-green velvet which matched her eyes, and there was a collar of dark fur.

“It’s a pretty thing,” Roger said, as he held it for her.  “It’s like the sea in a mist.”

She flashed a quick glance at him.  “I like that,” she said in her straightforward way.  “It is lovely.  Aunt Frances brought it to me last year from Paris.  Whenever you see me wear anything that is particularly nice, you’ll know that it came from Aunt Frances—­Aunt Isabelle’s sister.  She’s the rich member of the family.  And all the rest of us are as poor as poverty.”

Outside a motor horn brayed.  Then Porter Bigelow came in—­a perfectly put together young man, groomed, tailored, outfitted according to the mode.

“Are you ready, Contrary Mary?” he said, then saw Roger and stopped.

Porter was a gentleman, so his manner to Roger Poole showed no hint of what he thought of lodgers in general, and this one in particular.  He shook hands and said a few pleasant and perfunctory things.  Personally he thought the man looked down and out.  But no one could tell what Mary might think.  Mary’s standards were those of the dreamer and the star gazer.  What she was seeking she would never find in a Mere Man.  The danger lay however, in the fact that she might mistakenly hang her affections about the neck of some earth-bound Object and call it an Ideal.

As for himself, in spite of his Buff-Orpington crest, and his cock-o’-the-walk manner, Porter was, as far Mary was concerned, saturated with humility.  He knew that his money, his family’s social eminence were as nothing in her eyes.  If underneath the weight of these things Mary could find enough of a man in him to love that could be his only hope.  And that hope had held him for years to certain rather sedate ambitions, and had given him moral standards which had delighted his mother and had puzzled his father.