As he went, he was ruthless and convinced enough regarding himself. He had never, he raged, however stumbling he might have been, expected to find himself a little pilferer of love, a peeping, creeping area-sneak, and not even successful in his sneaking, less successful than the soda-clerks who swanked nightly with the virgins under the maples. He told himself that Orchid was a young woman of no great wisdom, a sigher and drawer-out of her M's and O's, but once he was in his lonely flat he longed for her, thought of miraculous and completely idiotic ways of luring her here to-night, and went to bed yearning, "Oh, Orchid—"
Perhaps he had paid too much attention to moonlight and soft summer, for quite suddenly, one day when Orchid came swarming all over the laboratory and perched on the bench with a whisk of stockings, he stalked to her, masterfully seized her wrists, and kissed her as she deserved to be kissed.
He immediately ceased to be masterful. He was frightened. He stared at her wanly. She stared back, shocked, eyes wide, lips uncertain.
"Oh!" she profoundly said.
Then, in a tone of immense interest and some satisfaction:
"Martin—oh—my dear—do you think you ought to have done that?"
He kissed her again. She yielded and for a moment there was nothing in the universe, neither he nor she, neither laboratory nor fathers nor wives nor traditions, but only the intensity of their being together.
Suddenly she babbled, "I know there's lots of conventional people that would say we'd done wrong, and perhaps I'd have thought so, one time, but— Oh, I'm terribly glad I'm liberal! Of course I wouldn't hurt dear Leora or do anything really wrong for the world, but isn't it wonderful that with so many bourgeois folks all around, we can rise above them and realize the call that strength makes to strength and— But I've simply got to be at the Y. W. C. A. meeting. There's a woman lawyer from New York that's going to tell us about the Modern Woman's Career."
When she had gone Martin viewed himself as a successful lover. "I've won her," he gloated. . . . Probably never has gloating been so shakily and badly done.
That evening, when he was playing poker in his flat with
