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FLAMING

YOUTH

house that night I was more than a little in love with you. Oh, calf-love, doubtless. better, doesn’t it?”

But—it makes it a little

“Yes,” answered Pat gravely. “It makes it a lot better —for both of us.” “Then we'll forget all of it that you’d wish forgotten,” said he. In her italicised moments Pat would have described the luncheon that followed as “too enticing.” But Pat did not feel stressful in the company of Warren Graves; she felt quiet and attentive, and wonderfully receptive to the breath of the greater world which he brought to her. He had been in the diplomatic service since the war, in several European capitals, had read and thought and mingled with men who were making or marring not the politics alone, but the very geography of the malleable earth. After a little light talk, in which Pat was conscious that he was trying her out, the rapprochement of their minds was established and he settled down to talk with her as if she had been a woman of the international world in which he moved. Her swift, apprehensive intelligence kept him up to his best form, As the coffee was finished he said reproachfully: “You’ve made me chatter my head off. And I’m supposed to have rather a gift for silence. How do you work your spells?” “By being sunk in admiring interest,” she answered, smiling up at him as she put on her gloves. “You’ve given me the most delightful hour I’ve had for years.” “But it needn’t end here, need it?” he protested anxiously. “Don’t you want to go to a matinée, or something?” “There aren’t any. It’s Friday.” “So it is. But there are always the movies.”