If you’ve gotten in debt, I’ll raise the cash, somehow. If it’s — Been going a little too far with Madeline?”

“You make me sick! You’ve got a dirty mind. I’m not worthy to touch Madeline’s hand. I regard her with nothing but respect.”

“The hell you do! But never mind, if you say so. Gosh, wish there was SOMETHING I could do for you. Oh! Have ‘nother shot! Barney! Come a-runnin’!”

By several drinks Martin was warmed into a hazy carelessness, and Clif solicitously dragged him home after he had desired to fight three large academic sophomores. But in the morning he awoke with a crackling skull and a realization that he was going to face Leora and Madeline at lunch.

V

His half-hour journey with Madeline into Zenith seemed a visible and oppressing thing, like a tornado cloud. He had not merely to get through each minute as it came; the whole grim thirty minutes were present at the same time. While he was practicing the tactful observation he was going to present two minutes from now, he could still hear the clumsy thing he had said two minutes before. He fought to keep her attention from the “great friend of his” whom they were to meet. With fatuous beaming he described a night at Barney’s; without any success whatever he tried to be funny; and when Madeline lectured him on the evils of liquor and the evils of association with immoral persons, he was for once relieved. But he could not sidetrack her.

“Who is this man we’re going to see? What are you so mysterious about? Oh, Martin, is it a joke? Aren’t we going to meet anybody? Did you just want to run away from Mama for a while and we have a bat at the Grand together? Oh, what fun! I’ve always wanted to lunch at the Grand. Of course I do think it’s too sort of rococo, but still, it is impressive, and — Did I guess it, darling?”

“No, there’s someone — Oh, we’re going to meet somebody, all right!”

“Then why don’t you tell me who he is? Honestly, Mart, you make me impatient.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. It isn’t a Him; it’s a Her.”

“Oh!”

“It’s — You know my work takes me to the hospitals, and some of the nurses at Zenith General have been awfully helpful.” He was panting. His eyes ached. Since the torture of the coming lunch was inevitable, he wondered why he should go on trying to resist his punishment. “Especially there’s one nurse there who’s a wonder. She’s learned so much about the care of the sick, and she puts me onto a lot of good stunts, and she seems like a nice girl — Miss Tozer, her name is — I think her first name is Lee or something like that — and she’s so — her father is one of the big men in North Dakota — awfully rich — big banker — I guess she just took up nursing to do her share in the world’s work.” He had achieved Madeline’s own tone of poetic uplift. “I thought you two might like to know each other. You remember you were saying how few girls there are in Mohalis that really appreciate — appreciate ideals.”

“Ye-es.” Madeline gazed at something far away and, whatever it was, she did not like it. “I shall be ver’ pleased to meet her, of course. ANY friend of yours — Oh, Mart! I do hope you don’t flirt; I hope you don’t get too friendly with all these nurses. I don’t know anything about it, of course, but I keep hearing how some of these nurses are regular man-hunters.”

“Well, let me tell you right now, Leora isn’t!”

“No, I’m sure, but — Oh, Martykins, you won’t be silly and let these nurses just amuse themselves with you? I mean, for your own sake. They have such an advantage. Poor Madeline, she wouldn’t be allowed to go hanging around men’s rooms learning — things, and you think you’re so psychological, Mart, but honestly, any smart woman can twist you around her finger.”

“Well, I guess I can take care of myself!”

“Oh, I mean — I don’t mean — But I do hope this Tozer person — I’m sure I shall like her, if you do, but — I am your own true love, aren’t I, always!”

She, the proper, ignored the passengers as she clasped his hand. She sounded so frightened that his anger at her reflections on Leora turned into misery. Incidentally, her thumb was gouging painfully into the back of his hand. He tried to look tender as he protested, “Sure — sure — gosh, honest, Mad, look out. The old duffer across the aisle is staring at us.”

For whatever infidelities he might ever commit he was adequately punished before they had reached the Grand Hotel.

The Grand was, in 1907, the best hotel in Zenith. It was compared by traveling salesmen to the Parker House, the Palmer House, the West Hotel.