She had selected Norman for the same reason that he had selected her; each recognized the other as the “grand prize.”  Pity is not nearly so close kin to love as is the feeling that the other person satisfies to the uttermost all one’s pet vanities.  It would have been next door to impossible for two people so well matched not to find themselves drawn to each other and filled with sympathy and the sense of comradeship, so far as there can be comradeship where two are driving luxuriously along the way of life, with not a serious cause for worry.  People without half the general fitness of these two for each other have gone through to the end, regarding themselves and regarded as the most devoted of lovers.  Indeed, they were lovers.  Only one of those savage tests, to which in all probability they would never be exposed, would or could reveal just how much, or how little, that vague, variable word lovers meant when applied to them.

As their eyes met, into each pair leaped the fine, exalted light of pride in possession.  “This wonderful woman is mine!” his eyes said.  And her eyes answered, “And you—­you most wonderful of men—­you are mine!” It always gave each of them a thrill like intoxication to meet, after a day’s separation.  All the joy of their dazzling good fortune burst upon them afresh.

“I’ll venture you haven’t thought of me the whole day,” said she as he dropped to the chair behind her.

It was a remark she often made—­to give him the opportunity to say, “I’ve thought of little else, I’m sorry to say—­I, who have a career to look after.”  He made the usual answer, and they smiled happily at each other.  “And you?” he said.

“Oh, I?  What else has a woman to think about?”

Her statement was as true as his was false.  He was indeed all she had to think about—­all worth wasting the effort of thought upon.  But he—­though he did not realize it—­had thought of her only in the incidental way in which an ambition-possessed man must force himself to think of a woman.  The best of his mind was commandeered to his career.  An amiable but shakily founded theory that it was “our” career enabled him to say without sense of lying that his chief thought had been she.

“How those men down town would poke fun at you,” said she, “if they knew you had me with you all the time, right beside you.”

This amused him.  “Still, I suspect there are lots of men who’d be exposed in the same way if there were a general and complete show-down.”

“Sometimes I wish I really were with you—­working with you—­helping you.  You have girls—­a girl—­to be your secretary—­or whatever you call it—­don’t you?”

“You should have seen the one I had to-day.  But there’s always something pathetic about every girl who has to make her own living.”

“Pathetic!” protested Miss Burroughs.  “Not at all.  I think it’s fine.”

“You wouldn’t say that if you had tried it.”