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I ASSIST A GET-AWAY
201

thought; there's something so disarming about Harper's. But it wasn't Harper's alone which made the effect. There was George a couple of seats away and he was reading the Atlantic Monthly, with Galsworthy's "Forsythe Saga" ready beside him for good measure, yet he didn't appear half so innocuous.

This was probably because he wasn't. The more I looked at George, the more I questioned his general character; but the more I gazed at Doris, the surer I was that—in all but one of the essential senses—she was a "good" girl. Looseness of living simply wasn't in her make-up.

You couldn't associate her with anything personally depraved or disagreeable. She'd no more steal a diamond ring, left in the ladies' wash room, than my mother, I felt certain. No; I was confident that her dereliction was highly specialized to the subject represented in that suit case of hers under my seat.

I wanted to talk to her about that and about other topics; but old "Iron Age" was asserting a priority claim just now.

He looked up at me and cut me dead, signifying of course that just now he and I weren't