dered, and shook his fist in Tommy's face. "Have you ever hugged that girl to death? No. I can see that by your meek and lowly face. Ever mussed her hair and tried to eat her up? No. And you never will. She 'll be one of the wives who'll wear everything buttoned up to the throat and down to the wrists. I know them," said the admiral with feeling. "Don't I, though! Those saintly women were of the vintage of my youth. You 've had the bad luck to draw a survival of them. Now, you think it over!" But this was the very last thing Tommy wanted to do—think. It made him uncertain and a little sad. His grandfather was right. Fate had handed him a sweetheart who had "the tender grace of faded things." In her still lived the formal spirit of the minuet, of supper at six, candle-light and cards, and everything over by ten. How, then, could he expect her to have also the highly colored charm of the usual sort of girl who would be "crazy about him," to whom face-powder was not a misdemeanor, nor the turkey trot a crime? No, you can't have everything. So Tommy cultivated a contented spirit, and grew even critical of girls who were strikingly different from Clarissa.

The store-room was almost full by this time, and Clarissa had inherited an unexpected legacy of twenty thousand dollars from a third cousin. She made a shy suggestion to Tommy that their marriage be hurried.

"Why not about a month from Michaelmas?" asked Clarissa.

After this was explained to Tommy's deplorable low-church comprehension, he consented, and late October was decided upon.

"You see, it seems foolish, Pierpont," Clarissa added in exact explanation, "to keep paying for a place to keep our furniture when we might use it for a home."

The remark not only chilled Tommy as a lover. Its thrift seemed to tie him up in knots. He had often winced under this biting economy in Clarissa: she had put a stop to his giving parties; would never let him buy her ice-cream sodas; tabooed his providing taxi-cabs for dances, preferring to go in the subway, bundled up, and with a veil tied under her chin, so that somehow she suggested a welldressed apple-woman. At such times she

would compute how much he had saved and urge him to lay it aside. Very good advice, excellent; yet Tommy began to feel as if he were in a gray world, walking beside a ghost who had no arms that he could feel about him, no warm lips that could be offered for his kisses.

Early in October they read of a most unique sale to be held in a house in the Thirties just off Fifth Avenue. A famous traveler had died, and his collection of South Sea curiosities was to be put up at auction.

"But I can't see how these could be mixed in with our Georgian specimens," said Tommy, delighted to "get one on" Clarissa when she suggested that they attend it.

"Only for a special place, Pierpont. In the apartment we 'll take there will probably be some little niche where you could retire when you wished to smoke—” "Why not in the yard?" Tommy snapped with a distinct snort.

"And," Clarissa continued, placidly ignoring the ugly sound, "these weapons and shields would give it an appropriately masculine touch."

So they went. As it was a wild, wet day, the attendance was small, and Clarissa grew excited in her controlled, smoldering way at the idea that the things would go at low prices. Tommy always got nearer to her at these auctions than at any other time. Color would show in her face, and her vague, gray eyes would darken and glow. While bidding cautiously, slowly, lifting the price only by half-dollars, she would grow eerily beautiful, a sort of ladylike vampire.

By the time the sale was finished she was radiant. For ridiculously low prices they had gained an astounding collection of South Sea impedimenta: high bamboo javelins; big shields made of bark and shaped like beetles; earthen bowls painted with daubs of savage color; petticoats of stiff, rattling grasses; coats of fiber; musical instruments, against the resonant wood and stretched gut of which padded sticks sagged, so that from the slightest touch or breeze they gave out savage notes-all these were some of what they had paid for, and which were heaped in one corner of the empty parlor.

"Everything must be taken away at once," said the man who was superin

Tommy set his teeth, and went in search of Clarissa, who was eying the savage-looking mass with an astute speculation in the gaze.

"To find a chance expressman," said Tommy to her, tensely, "near Fifth Avenue, late on a Saturday afternoon, and the rain coming down like lines of bayonets, is just about as likely as finding safety-razors on sale in a florist's. I'll go out and get a taxi."

As he expected, he saw Clarissa's frugality turn her into a stone image.

"If we paid for a taxi-cab, we would no longer be getting these at a bargain," she said coldly.

"Well, we 'll lose them altogether if we leave them here. You watch them,

and I'll get a taxi—”

"A taxi would n't accommodate half of them," she objected.

sion that if Clarissa were willing to make this brave and money-saving effort, it was unkind, even unmanly of him to demur.

So he made ready for the dash through the rain to the car. The inhospitable superintendent could not even give them newspapers for wrappings. Naked and gleaming, the sheaf of javelins and two big musical instruments were strapped to his back. Shields were tied to his arms. And against his chest he carried a big pottery bowl piled high with the one-time grass skirts of some nose-ringed, Polynesian belle. Clarissa burdened herself with all of the smaller articles that she could carry, and so they set out.

It had been all very well to think of "dashing" to the car. The javelins and the instruments hanging down Tommy's back kept getting between his legs, while, unless he walked with the utmost nicety, the shields on each arm thumped against his knees. He had not realized his awfulness until out in the grayness of the afternoon. Fortunately, there were few people abroad, but these stopped to investigate what they could see of Tommy. They also listened to him, for with every step he made melancholy music.

"They think we 're doing sandwich work!" he growled through the colored grasses at Clarissa. "I don't know why I ever consented to this. It 's awful. If

"Pierpont!" The word was soft and shocked. "Please don't say such things." "Other people are crowding theirs into cabs and motors. We 've got to get this stuff to the storehouse. How? You suggest something."

Her

Clarissa swallowed nervously. egg-shaped face was of a bluish pallor. "I was about to say that we could, between us, easily carry them—”

"Carry?" was Tommy's limp cry.

"To the Fourth Avenue car," Clarissa continued, unmoved. "It is only two blocks away, and will leave us at Seventeenth Street, quite close to the storagehouse. Though we could n't put up our umbrellas, we would n't get very wet."

Tommy was dead against it. Yet everything conspired to make him do what he detested: a feeling that they were stranded there; the boredom of further argument about expense; and the conclu

playing!" He paused for rest against an area railing, and managed to wipe the streams from his face. He was enraged, and although Clarissa's calm, pensive eyes reproved him, he was keyed to defy her. "If only some empty taxi would come, I'd take it."

"The car is very near now," she said impassively; "and this is wasting time." "On with the dance!" Tommy snapped, and began his mincing progress again. But after a few steps he stopped. His face was so bloodless she asked him if he felt faint.

"The club is on this street!" he said and choked. "I'd forgotten, and there -look at them!-Pete De Forest and Roger Davren and Brock Houston-coming!"

Tommy's club, a Fifth Avenue one, was a brand-new and beloved dignity for which the admiral paid. To say that at that moment he would have gladly van

ished down a sewer rather than have his friends see him as he was would be the simple truth. But he could not vanish anywhere. Already at a short distance from him, and before recognition, the three were eying him and Clarissa with the liveliest interest. He had to go on, and he did so with the arrowed heads of the javelins swaying above him from the back, and the painted grass prongs waving in front of him, and the musical instruments giving out with every step big, mournful plungs behind him.

"Perhaps they won't know us. Push that poi-bowl higher, so it hides your face!" he groaned. "I'll get lower, too, behind the grass!"

He tried this, his head averted, yet was aware that the men had to step into the gutter to make room for him and Clarissa to pass upon their bristling, reverberating way. He was also furiously aware that Clarissa, instead of avoiding their eyes, had lifted her Van Doorn chin and bowed to them imperiously. They did not speak to him. For this he inwardly thanked them and God.

Their troubles did not end at the carline. Four motormen, after open-mouthed stares at them, put on power and whizzed past. Not until Tommy stood in the middle of the tracks was he able to command attention. To enter the car he had almost to unload. Clarissa tripped against the musical instruments, and raised such a moaning that passengers asked what was the matter. The conductor looked derision. Tommy was just as wet from his pores as from the rain. So was Clarissa. Both were silent. But Tommy's speechlessness implied a flood of vituperation waiting behind a dam; and Clarissa knew it.

The ramshackle storehouse was closed. The money that might have been paid for a cab had to go to the old watchman before he grumblingly admitted them. The elevator had stopped running. There was no gas in the upper part of the house. So, after a climb of six stories, and in the candle-lighted store-room crowded with the milestones of their romance, Tommy and Clarissa "had it out."

"After turning me into a South Sea Island hut on moving-day, why, when I asked you not to, did you bow to my friends?" he demanded at white heat,

while wiping his pouring face and what he could get at of neck and wrists. "Why?"

"I felt we were doing nothing reprehensible," she said calmly and smiled. "I don't think my position in society will suffer from it."

"Because you 're a Van Doorn! For that reason you think you could walk up Fifth Avenue carrying a mutton-chop instead of a vanity-case, and mutton-chops would become fashionable."

She did not deny this. Leaning restfully against a Sheraton spindle-back settle, she smiled.

"I see nothing humiliating in either poverty or economy," she said in her gentle voice.

"But what about-meanness?" Tommy asked and glared.

"I don't understand," she inquired in a cold, threatening way.

"Meanness!" he repeated. "It was mean of you to insist on it, and for me to allow myself to be turned into a truckan outlandish, musical truck-upon the New York streets just to save the hire of a cab that I could well afford. I'm boiling with shame. I'm sick. I feel like a bit of filth."

unnecessarily

"Your language is strong," said Clarissa through almost shut lips, and made for the door.

"Everything 's too strong for you," he cried, and faced her fully. "You have a refinement that 's nasty.'

"Don't come with me," said Clarissa, coldly.

"I won't!" Tommy blazed, and she disappeared down the dark passage.

The next day, in the neatest of bundles, his ring and letters came back. He also received a check from her which paid for his share of the collected furniture. He was very miserable. He was only twentytwo, he had not cultivated girls, and Clarissa had become a habit with him. So had ancient furniture. When Tommy realized that never again on those wet days beloved of bargain-hunters would he sit beside Clarissa at auctions and hear her bid little by little on something really good, he wanted to place his young face on the big book where his small handwriting was still wet and weep.

He was several pounds lighter when, on the next Saturday afternoon, he went

to the storehouse. He still had the key to the room, and he wanted to put back a very old Lowestoft bowl, with rose decoration, that she had loaned him, and which he felt was now rightfully hers. But the door was open a little way, and beyond it he heard a woman's sobbing. It was deep, but dainty, a perfectly refined outburst that would have been approved of by the very best families. Of course it was Clarissa.

"For me!" Tommy thought, a painful, yet ecstatic, lump forming in his throat. "Weeping for me!" He felt cozily important again.

"Clarissa," said Tommy, and put the bit of exquisite china on a card-table that was shaped like a half-moon and stacked on a fender, "can't you forgive me?"

She looked at him thoughtfully. "Since last night I am in a sense betrothed to Nicholas Gansevoort."

"Your cousin! That anemic little curate!" Tommy gasped. "You don't love him. Clarissa, think it over! O darling, take me back, and I'll do anything! I'll even buy that apple savings-bank you 're so keen about, and save car-fare!"

They had almost made up-almost. Clarissa had allowed him to take her hand when, in his eagerness, his elbow knocked against something that fell with a splintery crash. Tommy paid no attention to it. With eyes alight he tried to put his arm around her, not seeing that horror was crimping her face as she gazed over his shoulder.

"I'm hungry for you!" Tommy confided passionately.

"The Lowestoft bowl!" Clarissa gasped. "Rare specimen-rose decoration-broken!"

"Darling!" he whispered.
"The-Lowestoft -"

"Oh, to hell with the Lowestoft bowl!" He gave a wild, gay laugh, clutched her, and held her prisoner in a stifling, devouring kiss. "My own!" Tommy murmured in a burning tone as he let her breathe.

But Clarissa did not look in the least as if she belonged in his possessive case. Panting, her skin gone drab, she was unwinding him as she would a snake.

"Leave this room, and never speak to me again!" she said in an icy, remote voice. “A man who could laugh at breaking an old Lowestoft bowl-and curseand presume to kiss me in that coarse way, is a man I would not include even among my acquaintances!"

Tommy stood frozen. His mouth hung open. He began wrinkling his nose and winking as if he had come out of sleep to find himself all "pins and needles." Then words began to trickle from him as notes come from a clock running down:

"I guess my grandfather was right. You 're the sort to think more of that broken egg-shell china-than of a manand his love-and his needs, for you 're egg-shell china yourself. You-why, Clarissa-you 're not human!"

"Go!" she said thinly, with a pale

stare.

He swayed out blindly, like a drunkard, a bit of the Lowestoft bowl sticking in his boot-sole.

He received a letter from the admiral a week or so later. This was in answer to his own, telling of the broken engagement, to which bit of news he had added that his heart was a cinder, that he would never love again, that the beastly, rotten game of life was over for him, and so why could n't he just die?

"Dear Tom," the admiral wrote, "I received your welcome letter. Thank God you 're not going to hardtack and water by way of the altar. I am sending you a check. You need a change. Take a year off. Get one of your pals and go round the world. Cultivate the girls you meet-all sorts of girls. Study them. Play around. Be a gentleman. Have a good time. Don't drink.

"YOUR AFFECTIONATE GRANDFATHER.

"P.S. Try hard not to get married till you come back, so I can size her up for you!"