“He was doing something to his automobile.  I didn’t pay any attention at first—­then I realized he was just fooling with the automobile—­and was looking at me.

“And then he took my breath away by stepping up to me and raising his hat.  I had never had a man raise his hat to me in that way—­

“And then he said—­and his voice was low—­and like the voices in your world are—­I hadn’t heard them before, except on the wire—­’I beg pardon—­I trust I’m not offensive.  But you seem so tired.  You’re waiting for a car?  It doesn’t appear to be coming.  Why not ride with me instead?  I’ll take you where you want to go.  Though I wish’—­it was like the voice on the wire—­and for me—­’that you’d let me take you for a ride.’

“Katie, you called him charming.  You told about the women in your world being in love with him.  If he’s charming to them—­to you—­what do you suppose he seemed to me as he stood there smiling at me—­looking so sorry for me—?

“He went on talking.  He drew a beautiful picture of what we would do.  We would ride up along the lake.  There would be a breeze from the lake, he said.  And way up there he knew a place where we could sit out of doors under trees and eat our dinner and listen to beautiful music.  Didn’t I think that might be nice?

“Didn’t I think it might be—­nice? Oh Katie—­you’d have to know what that day had been—­what so many days—­all days—­had been.

“I looked down the street.  The car was coming at last—­packed—­men hanging on outside—­everybody looking so hot—­so dreadful.  ’Oh you mustn’t get in that car,’ he said.

“Beautiful things were beckoning to me—­things I was to be taken to in an automobile—­I had never been in an automobile.  It seemed I was being rescued, carried away to a land of beautiful things, far away from crowded street cars, from the heat and the work that make you do things you hate yourself for doing.

“Was it so common, Katie?  So low?  What I felt wasn’t—­what I dreamed as we went along that beautiful drive beside the lake.

“For I dreamed that the city of dreadful things was being left behind.  The fairy prince had come for me.  He was taking me to the things of dreams, things which lately had seemed to slip out beyond even dreams.

“It was just as he had said—­A little table under a tree—­a breeze from the lake—­music—­the lovely things to eat and the beautiful happy people.  Of course I wasn’t dressed as much as they were, so we sat at a little table half hidden in one corner—­Oh I thought it was so wonderful!

“And he saw I thought it wonderful and that interested him, pleased him.  Maybe it was new to him.  I think he likes things that are new to him.  Anyhow, he was very gentle and lovely to me that night.  He told me I was beautiful—­that nothing in the world had ever been so beautiful as my eyes.  You know how he would say it, the different ways he would have of saying it beautifully.  And I want to say again—­if it seems beautiful to you—­Why, Katie, I had never had anything.