“I’ve manufactured a new definition of happiness,” Sally said to Bobby Dane, six months later.

“What now?”

“Think with the mob.”

“Who has rubbed you the wrong way, this time?” Bobby queried unsympathetically.

“Everybody. I am so tired of hearing people praise Beatrix for marrying Sidney Lorimer.”

Bobby halted and shook hands with her, to the manifest wonder of the post-ecclesiastical Fifth Avenue throng.

“That’s where even your head is level, Sally,” he said, as he resumed his stroll. “Do you want to know what I think of her?”

“If you agree with me; not otherwise. I hate arguments, and, besides, it is bad form to condemn one’s dearest friend. But keeping still so long has nearly driven me to ”

“Tetanus,” Bobby suggested. “Well, my impression of Beatrix is that she is a bally idiot. I don’t know just what bally means; but our English brethren apply it in critical cases, and so it is sure to be right. Yes, I think Beatrix is very bally indeed.”

“Then you don’t approve, either?”

“Me? I? I have hated Lorimer from the start.”

“I haven’t,” Sally said, after a thoughtful interval. “I liked him at first.”

“You never saw him at the club,” Bobby returned briefly.

“What did he do there?”

“I don’t know. He just wasn’t right.”

Sally paced along meditatively at his side.

“Bobby, you are a critical being,” she observed at length.

“Mayhap. But the event justifies me. I never have liked Lorimer, and I never shall.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

Bobby opened his hands and turned them palm downwards.

“There’s nothing to be done. I hate to see Beatrix throw herself away; but I can’t help it.”

“I wonder what her idea is,” Sally said thoughtfully. “She has always been so down upon any fastness that I supposed she would cut his acquaintance entirely, after that Lloyd Avalons supper.”

“He acted an awful cad, that night.” Bobby’s tone was disdainful. “I helped get him home and, before he was fairly out of the dining-room, he was bragging about his family, and his money, and the Lord knows what.”

“Yes, I heard him. Beatrix heard some of it, too, before Mr. Thayer took her away. I was at her house, the next afternoon, when Mr. Lorimer called, and I was sure she would break her engagement there and then. Put not your faith in the principles of a woman in love.”

“Confound her principles! That’s what is the matter with her,” Bobby growled. “I had always supposed that Beatrix was a reasonable girl; but no girl in her senses would tackle the job of marrying Sidney Lorimer to reform him.”

“When I do it, I’ll reverse things and reform the man to marry him,” Sally returned shrewdly.

Bobby raised his brows.

“The first time you’ve ever warned me that I was on probation, Sally!”

“I said a man, not a boy,” she replied unkindly. “But, after all, Mr. Lorimer has been perfectly steady, all summer long.”

“Mm yes, after a fashion. Of course, he would do his best, for I will do him the justice to admit that he loves Beatrix with all the manhood there is in him. To be sure, that’s not saying much.”

“You aren’t quite fair to him, Bobby. He must have some manhood in him, to have steadied down as much as he has done, this summer.”

Bobby shrugged his shoulders.

“He is playing for high stakes, Sally, and he can afford to be careful. Any slip now would prove to be the losing of the whole game. Wait a year and see.”

“Then you think ”

“That his reform is skin deep, and that, like all other serpents, he sloughs his skin once a year.”

“Bobby!”

“Sarah Maria!”

“Don’t make fun of me because I was named for a spinster aunt. I can’t help my name.”

“No; it’s past help. I’d change it, if I were you. Just think how it would sound at the altar, while the alteration was going on! ’I, Sarah Maria, take thee ’”

Sally interposed hurriedly.

“But, to go back to Beatrix, if you feel in this way about Mr. Lorimer, why don’t you do something about it?”

“Do what, for example?”

“Speak to her father, or something.”

Bobby’s answer had an accent of utter gravity which somehow belied the frivolous form of his words.

“Sally, I’ll give you a new proverb, one I have found useful at times. Put not thy finger into thy neighbor’s pie, lest it get stuck there permanently.”

For the next few blocks, the silence between them was unbroken. Sally nodded to an occasional acquaintance, and Bobby, without lifting his eyes from the ground, seconded her salute with the mechanical raising of his hat which good breeding demands. Few conventions are more exasperatingly impersonal than the bow and smile of the average social being.

“But I love Beatrix,” Sally said inconsequently, after an interval.

“I, too.”

For the moment, both voices had lost their customary tone of light banter. Bobby broke the next pause.

“Couldn’t you say something, Sally?”

“I wish I could; but it is no use. Beatrix hasn’t the least respect for my opinion. She thinks I am only a child, and, moreover, once upon a time, I urged her to marry Mr. Lorimer. Of course, that was before any of this came out about him; but I hate to go into details with her, and, if I don’t she will think it’s nothing but a whim.”

“What do you care what she thinks?”

Sally shifted her eyes from the apartment houses on Eighth Avenue to Bobby’s face.

“Bobby, I am afraid of Beatrix,” she confessed. “She is built on a larger frame than I am, and we both of us are quite aware of the fact.”

“It may be a part of her capacious frame to risk her life in marrying Sidney Lorimer,” Bobby grumbled; “but, for my part, I prefer smaller women.”

Sally faced him suddenly.

“Bobby! You don’t mean you think he will kill her sometime when he is drunk?”

“No such luck! In the intervals, he will adore her and treat her like a princess; but he won’t spare her the anxiety and the shame of knowing he is liable to take too much at any reception to which they may send an acceptance. You haven’t seen men as I have, Sally; you don’t know how far they can make babbling fools of themselves, without being absolutely drunk. To a girl like Beatrix, the shame of it when it does occur, and the fear of the shame, when it doesn’t, would be worse than sudden death. That gets over and done with; the other hangs on and grows worse and worse to an endless end.”

“And you think there’s no cure?”

Once more Bobby shrugged his shoulders.

“I wouldn’t take any chances.”

“You think Beatrix can’t hold him?”

“She can for a time; but there’s no knowing how long the time will last. Any medicine loses its effect, if it is repeated often enough.”

“What about Mr. Thayer?”

“He has more power over Lorimer than anyone else; but he has his own professional life before him, and it won’t be long before New York has a small share of his time. He isn’t going to give up a grand success for the sake of playing keeper to Sidney Lorimer.”

“I think he is fully capable of the sacrifice.”

“Capable, yes. But it would be a sin to allow it; it would be spoiling a saint to patch up a sinner. Thayer’s future is too broad to be limited by a futile creature like Lorimer. If he turns Quixotic, I’ll poison him. At least, that will ensure his dying in the full tide of professional success.”

“Ye-es,” Sally answered thoughtfully; “but, do you know, Mr. Thayer is so perfectly organized that I have an idea he could swallow a certain amount of poison and come out of it unharmed, if his will were really bent upon accomplishing some definite end.”

There was another interval. It was Sally’s turn to break it.

“Bobby, does it occur to you that we are just exactly where we started? We both hate Mr. Lorimer; we hate the idea of his marrying Beatrix, and neither one of us dares interfere. Let’s go and talk to Miss Gannion.”

“What’s the use?”

“To clear out our mental ganglia. At least, by the time we have been over it with her, we shall know what we think, and there’s a certain satisfaction in that.”

“I know just what I think about it now.”

“What do you think?”

“Damn,” Bobby replied concisely.

They found Miss Gannion alone before the fire. She threw down her book and welcomed them cordially.

“I had an indolent fit, to-day,” she said, as she drew some chairs up before the hearth. “Once in a while, I prefer to dismiss my clerical adviser and settle my problems to suit myself. To be sure, I am quite likely to settle them wrongly; but that renews my confidence in churchly methods, so some good is gained, after all.”

Bobby deliberately placed himself in the chair which long experience of Miss Gannion’s house had taught him best fitted the angles of his anatomy.

“We came to have you settle a problem for us,” he said; “so we are glad your hand is in.”

“And the problem,” Sally added; “is Beatrix.”

“What about Beatrix?” Miss Gannion asked.

“She is going to marry Sidney Lorimer, and she mustn’t. Please tell us how we are going to prevent it.”

Miss Gannion sat still for a moment, with her clear eyes fixed on the glowing embers.

“Are you sure that it would be best to prevent it?” she asked then.

Bobby started to his feet, faced about, and stood looking down at the little figure of his hostess.

“Miss Gannion, Beatrix and I have been chums ever since we could go alone. In fact, we learned to go alone by hanging on to each other’s hands. I love her as a fellow without any sisters is bound to love a girl cousin; and I’ll be blest if I can keep quiet and see her throw herself away.”

“Have you spoken to her about it?”

“I don’t dare,” Bobby returned bluntly. “I know I should end by losing my temper and saying things about Lorimer. I wouldn’t hurt Beatrix for the world, and I believe she honestly thinks she is doing the Lord’s own work in not throwing Lorimer over.”

“Perhaps she may be,” Miss Gannion said gently.

“Miss Gannion! Well, if she is, I shall have to revise my notions of the Lord,” Bobby responded hotly.

Miss Gannion’s smile never wavered. She knew Bobby Dane too well to resent his occasional outbursts.

“Bobby, my dear boy,” she said, with the maternal accent she assumed at times; “this isn’t too easy a problem for any of us; but the hardest part of its solution is coming on Beatrix. It’s not an easy place to put a woman with a conscience. The old-fashioned idea was to marry a man to reform him; the new-fashioned practice is to wash your hands of him altogether, as soon as he makes a single slip. The middle course is the most difficult one to take and the most thankless. Any good woman is sure to have a strong hold on the man who loves her; and, in times of real danger, she is afraid to let go that hold.”

Bobby shook his head.

“That’s Beatrix all over, Miss Gannion. But it will take a mighty strong grip to haul Lorimer across to firm ground.”

“I realize that.”

“But the question is, does Beatrix realize it, too,” Sally said abruptly.

“Better than we can. I think she has measured both the danger and her own strength.”

Bobby took a turn or two up and down the room. Then he came back to the hearthrug.

“She can’t do it,” he said conclusively. “The odds are all against her. Lorimer can’t pull her down, of course; but he can tug and tug till he has used up all her strength and she has to let him go. And then what? Miss Gannion, do you honestly think it worth the while?”

“No; I do not,” she said reluctantly.

“Then why the deuce do you argue for it?” he asked, with a recurrence of his former temper. “I beg your pardon, Miss Gannion; but this maddens me, and I came here to have you help me find a way out. Instead, you are in favor of Beatrix’s signing her own death warrant.”

“No,” she said slowly. “Down in my heart of hearts, I think it is all a mistake, a terrible mistake; and I have tried in vain to find a way to prevent it. Then, each time I think it over, I am afraid to prevent it, because it seems to me that Beatrix’s mistake is just a little bit nobler than the safe course which we ourselves would take.”

“Have you heard Mr. Thayer say what he thinks about it?” Sally asked.

“Not lately.”

Sally’s eyes were under less subjection than her tongue, and Miss Gannion answered the question they so plainly asked.

“Long ago, before the night of the concert, even, Mr. Thayer spoke of the matter to me. Since then he has never mentioned it.”

“I wish you would ask him what he thinks now,” Sally said bluntly. “He knows Mr. Lorimer better than any of us do, and he should be able to judge what we ought to do about it.”

“The honest fact is,” Bobby broke in thoughtfully; “we can’t one of us do a solitary thing about it, but get together and grumble. Beatrix hasn’t a clinging, confiding nature; she makes up her own mind and she doesn’t change it easily. If she has decided to marry Lorimer, we can kneel in a ring at her feet and shed tears by the pint, and all the good it will do us will be the chance of making her die of pneumonia caused by the surrounding dampness. But it’s a beastly shame! I’d rather she married Arlt and done with it. If you’ve got to form a character, it’s better to start in while the character is young.”

Miss Gannion caught at the opportunity for a digression.

“Mr. Arlt is coming to lunch,” she observed.

“To-day? I didn’t know he was back in town.”

“He came last night.”

“Was Mr. Thayer with him?”

“No; Mr. Thayer sings in Boston, last night and to-night. He sent me a note, saying I might expect him to dinner on Tuesday.”

“I wonder what success Mr. Arlt has had.”

“Mr. Thayer sent me some criticisms. They were very enthusiastic, as far as they went; but that was only a few lines.”

“And the rest of the criticism probably concerned itself with Thayer, and was discreetly cut away,” Bobby said, as he dropped back into his chair. “Miss Gannion, Arlt is on the steps, and you have not invited us to stay to lunch, so we must take a reluctant departure. Before I go, though, I’d like to ask one favor. When Thayer comes, Tuesday night, are you willing to talk the whole matter over with him and see what he thinks about it now? There would be a certain consolation to me in knowing that he disapproved the affair, and he may possibly suggest some way of breaking it off.”

“Possibly,” Miss Gannion assented; “unless it is already too late.”

The words were still ringing in the air, when Arlt came into the room. They were still ringing in Bobby’s ears, ten minutes later, when he and Sally took their leave.

“My mental ganglia are cleared,” Bobby said disconsolately, as they went down the steps. “I now see that there is precisely one thing for us to do, and only one.”

“What is that?”

“To grin and bear it.”