"Going for a ride in her?" Bunty echoed with his easy laugh. "Looks like as if I was. Say, why I'm the barker for her, sonny. Thought I was still up at Paul's Landing, did you, doing write-ups for that cemetery of a paper? No, sir, that was in the far away and long ago. I been showing New York for nearly two years now. Hop right in—got a capacity load, but I guess the girls'll make room for you. (I'm taking round Saint Elfrida's select boarding school, from Peapack—yes, sir; six front rows; bunch of lookers, ain't they? Primarily an art trip; we take in the Lib'ry, the Metropolitan, the Cathedral and the Palisades.) See here, pile in, Vance; never mind about your grip. 'Gainst the rules, I know; but shove it under the seat while the chauffeur's looking at her appendix. There—in you go; this row. Say, there's a girl at the other end that'll give you a squeeze-in next to her; there, the one with the blue hat."

The barker caught Vance under the elbow to launch him on his way; and then, as he moved forward, called after him stentorianly: "Say, Vance, I want you to meet my feeancee; yes, that's her in the blue hat. Laura Lou, meet Mr. Weston… . Gee, Vance, but ain't you Laura Lou's cousin? Say, well, if I didn't clean forget you and me'd got acquainted at the Tracys'… . Laura Lou, here's your cousin Vance Weston, come all the way from Illinois to see you. Now then, ladies and gentlemen, all aboard, please!"

Vance found himself climbing past a row of exposed pink knees. A flutter of girlish exclamations greeted him, and he slipped into a crack between a stout Jewish-looking young woman in rimless glasses and the girl under the blue hat, whose flexible young body seemed to melt against his own as she made room for him.

"Laura Lou!" he exclaimed as the car swayed out into the street. He could hardly believe that this little face with the pale rosy mouth and the delicately traced eyebrows could be that of the sulky flapper of Paul's Landing. Yet he remembered that one evening when she came in for supper, late and a little flushed, in a faded yellow muslin the colour of her hair, he had thought her almost pretty. Almost pretty—crude fool that he'd been, craving only such coarse fare as Floss Delaney and 'Smeralda Cran! Time had refined his taste as it had his cousin's features; and he looked at her with new eyes… .

"Vance!" she said, in her shy drawling voice, but without a trace of shyness in her own eyes, which rested on him with a sort of affectionate curiosity.