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 pardoned for having dismissed Miss Denver, if he had thought of her at all, as not sui generis.

We now proceed more rapidly. Entering the hallway of Moretti's on Thirty-fifth Street, about half past one cocktail of a winter evening, he found the cramped vestibule crowded by several persons taking off their wraps. A copy of the Oblique Review, unmistakable in its garlic-green cover, fell at his feet. Thinking it his own, he picked it up and was about to pocket it when a red tam o'shanter in front of him turned round. He saw the bobbed brown hair and gray eyes of Miss Denver. "Well, Mr. Valiant, what are you doing with my magazine?"

"Oh—why—I beg your pardon! I thought it was mine! I'm awfully sorry!" He was keenly embarrassed, and pulled his own copy out of his overcoat pocket as an evidence of good faith.

She laughed. "I don't wonder you made the mistake," she said. "Probably you thought you were the only person in New York reading the Oblique!"

He felt the alarm that every shy or cautious youth experiences in the presence of beauty, and, with a mumbled apology, fled hastily to a little table in a corner. There, pretending to read some preposterous farrago of free verse, he watched Miss