Chapter 30

Down in the open square, under the clear cool stars, they looked at each other and laughed.

“Lead me to a bus!” cried Quin. “I want to ride on top of it where the wind can blow through my whiskers. My head feels like a joss-house!”

“Oh, but you were funny!” cried Eleanor. “I wish you could have seen your face when all those women swarmed around you. I was afraid you were going to jump out of the window! Did you ever feel anything so hot and stuffy as that room? And weren’t they all silly and make-believe?”

Quin gave a mighty sigh of relief at being out of it.

“Is this the sort of thing you get let in for often?” he inquired, aghast.

“Oftener than I like. You see, all those people are Papa Claude’s old friends, and he’s been having a lovely time showing me off as he showed you off to-night.”

“But you surely don’t like it?”

“Of course I don’t. And they know it. They are already calling me a prig, and poking fun at me for not smoking and for not liking to have my hands patted and my cheeks pinched. Isn’t it funny, Quin? At home I was always miserable because there were too many barriers; I wanted to tear them all down. Here, where there aren’t any, I find myself building them up at every turn, and getting furious when people climb over them.”

“Bartlett versus Martel, eh?”

“I suppose so. Heaven knows, I wish I were one thing or the other.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Quin. “You are pretty nice just as you are.” Then he added inconsequently: “Who was that fat man you were talking to when I came up?”

“Mr. Pfingst. He is Estelle Linton’s backer.”

“Backer?” queried Quin. Then, when he saw Eleanor’s eyes drop, he added vaguely: “Oh! I see!”

For the next block, strange to say, he did not think so much about Eleanor as he did about Miss Isobel Bartlett. The whole situation kept presenting itself through her austere eyes, and instinctively he put a protecting hand on Eleanor’s elbow.

When at last they were on top of the bus, with the big, noisy city apparently going in the opposite direction, they promptly forgot all about the studio party and plunged headlong into their own important affairs.

“Begin at the very beginning,” commanded Eleanor, settling herself for a good long ride; “I want you to tell me everything.”

The beginning and the end and all that lay between them could easily have been compassed in three words by Quin. But there were things he had pledged himself to tell her before he even broached the subject that was shrieking for utterance. With painstaking exactness he set forth the facts that led up to his dismissal, trying to be fair to Mr. Bangs as well as to himself, and, above all, to claim no credit for taking the stand he had.

But Eleanor would not see it thus. With characteristic fervor she espoused his cause. She declared he had been treated outrageously. He ought to have taken the matter straight to her grandmother. The very idea! After all the work he had done at the factory, for him to be dismissed just because he wouldn’t do a thing that he considered dishonorable! She hated Mr. Bangs—she always had hated him; and the more she dwelt upon the fact, the more ardently she approved Quin’s course.

“It was perfectly splendid of you to refuse his offer!” she cried, and her eyes blazed with that particular ray of feminine partisanship that is most soothing to the injured masculine. “And you won’t lose by it in the long run. You’ll get another position right off. Why don’t you try to get one here in New York?”

“Would you like me to?”

“I should say I should! Then we could do all sorts of jolly things together. Not studio parties or cabarets, but jolly outdoor things like we used to do at home. Do stay, Quin; won’t you?”

She was looking up at him with such frank urgency and such entire sympathy that Quin lost his head completely.