"Oh, she's as proud of her as I am! But if she doesn't approve I'll take you upstairs. That'll be because, as you say you're just the person. I haven't the least doubt of it—but you were going to tell me why."
Jean treated it as if it were almost a secret. "Because she was born on my day."
"Your birthday?"
"My birthday—the twenty-fourth."
"Oh, I see; that's charming—that's delightful!" The circumstance had not quite all the subtlety she had beguiled him into looking for, but her amusing belief in it, which halved the date like a succulent pear, mingled oddly, to make him quickly feel that it had enough, with his growing sense that Mrs. Beever's judgment of her hair was a libel. "It's a most extraordinary coincidence—it makes a most interesting tie. Do, therefore, I beg you, whenever you keep you anniversary, keep also a little hers."
"That's just what I was thinking," said Jean. Then she added, still shy, yet suddenly almost radiant: "I shall always send her something!"
"She shall do the same to you!" This idea had a charm even for Tony, who determined on the
