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 “What was I saying?” Drew turned to me. “Ah, yes—the girls—the girls will be down in a minute. Bless them! That little Mary Will—like a breath of springtime from her own mountains. Ah, youth—youth! All I have gained, all that I have—I’d swap it to-night for youth. My boy, you don’t know what you’ve got.”.

I stared at him. “He’ll steal your shirt, and you’ll beg him to take the pants too.” Thus inelegantly had old Drew been described to me in China, and there was some truth in it, surely. Where was my hatred of a moment ago? Confound it, there was something likable about him after all.

I stared at him no longer, for now outside the curtains I could see Mary Will coming down the stairs. Many beautiful women had come down those stairs in the days when social history was making in that old house on Nob Hill—women whose loveliness was now Rh