distinguished by that knowledge of New York streets and cafés and local heroes which, to Una, the recent convert to New York, seemed the one great science.

Their rockers creaked in complete sympathy.

The perfect summer man took up his shepherd’s tale:

“There’s a whole lot of things she’d certainly oughta have admired in you, lemme tell you. I suppose probably Maxine Elliott is better-looking than what you are, maybe, but I always was crazy over your kind of girl—blond hair and nice, clear eyes and just shoulder-high—kind of a[195] girl that could snuggle down beside a fireplace and look like she grew there—not one of these domineerin’ sufferin’ cats females. No, nor one of these overdressed New-York chickens, neither, but cute and bright—”

“Oh, you’re just flattering me, Mr. Schwirtz. Mr. Hunt told me I should watch out for you.”

“No, no; you got me wrong there. ‘I dwell on what-is-it mountain, and my name is Truthful James,’ like the poet says! Believe me, I may be a rough-neck drummer, but I notice these things.”

“Oh!... Oh, do you like poetry?”

Without knowing precisely what she was trying to do, Una was testing Mr. Schwirtz according to the somewhat contradictory standards of culture which she had acquired from Walter Babson, Mamie Magen, Esther Lawrence, Mr. Wilkins’s books on architecture, and stray copies of The Outlook, The Literary Digest, Current Opinion, The Nation, The Independent, The Review of Reviews, The World’s Work, Collier’s, and The Atlantic Monthly, which she had been glancing over in the Home Club library. She hadn’t learned much of the technique of the arts, but she had acquired an uneasy conscience of the sort which rather discredits any book or music or picture which it easily enjoys. She was, for a moment, apologetic to these insistent new standards, because she had given herself up to Mr. Schwirtz’s low conversation.... She was not vastly different from a young lady just back in Panama from a term in the normal school, with new lights derived from a gentlemanly young English teacher with poetic interests and a curly mustache.

“Sure,” affirmed Mr. Schwirtz, “I like poetry fine. Used to read it myself when I was traveling out of St. Paul and got kind of stuck on a waitress at Eau Claire.” This did not perfectly satisfy Una, but she was more[196] satisfied that he had heard the gospel of culture after he had described, with much detail,