You see the state I was in-and still am-ma chere amie? So I said airily that I had seen a girl across the recital room, whom I could swear I knew and yet could not think of her name. I invited each of my companions to supply it, if she might. Miss Prince looked blank and Lady Bab stared at me as if I must have been mad. As for Lord Significance, he would not deign to take the cigar from his mouth. What could I want with so common a girl as the one they heard me speak of? It was Miss Prince who took pity on me at last and said she believed my goddess to be a counter-girl somewhere-a Julie Something. It was enough! With that I would track her to the ends of time and space. She was Julie!

Julie! The name rang in my mind. My heart bounded as if I already clasped her in my arms. As we walked back into the buzz of talk, the recital room warm and filling with the devotees of Brahms, I tried to check my feelings. A gentleman does not entertain such grand passions for a shopgirl. It can lead only to disagreeable consequences. Is that not the truth, my darling cousin? My new love would either spurn me with the laughter of a street Arab or else her mean little eyes would measure the depth of my purse and calculate what could be emptied from it. Am I not right, my dearest Maude? I am.

You know it. And yet I did not care. Oh, I might make a fool of myself and be bitterly miserable when the bizarre romance was ended. I did not care. Our greatest anxiety is for the loss of a chance which will never come again. As the clear, crisp piano notes sounded the twirls and twiddles of the motif which begins the Handel Variations, I dreaded the loss of the unknown nymph as greatly as if it were to be the death of the person who had been dearest to me until an hour before. I watched her sit down again, Maude, and I wondered as anyone might what a girl of such common stock was doing at a recital of this kind. I believe she was there only to assist her companion or employer. It was an elderly and palsied woman who sat by her side.