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love another gal in those ways where the wife don’t quite fill the bill. Sabe?”
    “Yes, I sabe, Prothero. It’s n. g. If you don’t believe me, go over to any of the tables you see round here and put it up to the upholstered mamas you see there.”
    In the warm beer-scented security of Wielert’s first-class family resort, the heavy harmonies of a full reed band, playing Wagner, Beethoven, “Ach, du lieber Augustin,” “The Boat Is Coming Around the Bend, Good-By, My Lover, Good-By,” flowed over table after table of Cincinnati’s High-German, solid-as-Gibraltar citizenry, dipping mustachios into foam-crested mugs.
    Into this old-world atmosphere of cream-colored walls, inscribed with German mottoes of epicurean source, there gathered, evening after evening, around the solid-mahogany tables, the firmly hewn bourgeoisie of this Munich-on-the-Ohio. Wielert’s—“the true family resort in every respect.”
    Surrounding the table where Prothero and Ray were letting the foam on their glasses blink out sud by sud, were gathered the spine of the community. Sons and daughters of the Rhine, who could date their invasion back to that historic day when citizen Nicholas Longworth had first conceived the idea of transplanting his countrymen from the sunkissed vineyards of the Rhineland to these similar bland hills of Cincinnati, whither he had migrated and prospered.
    The vineyards did not quite come off; the transplantation did. Evidences of it and its progeny were everywhere in Wielert’s. Families that dined out once a week. Sturdy, unstylish women with enormous busts, who ate and drank with relish but knew, to the penny, for how much less they could spread their groaning home tables with these luxuries of
Schmierkäse
and
Schnittlauch, Bratwurst
that had been fried without a prong of the exploring fork puncturing the sausage casing for loss of juice. Solid, thrifty men, in gates-ajar collars and congress shoes, to whom the
Turnverein
and
Sangverein
, the right lager, the virtuous wife, the virgin daughter, the respecting son, the well-tended business, were universe.
    Yes, siree, it was possible, all right, sitting there in the pretentious early-evening respectability of Wielert’s pavilion, while a man in short pants, with braid running down the side seams, knee-shystockings, and a small green hat with a brush in it, yodeled, to feel a little mad over the desirability of Ray. One tony girl.
    And where there was smoke there must be fire. Ray Schmidt was to be had for the asking all right, if you knew how to ask. Girls simply did not run around that way, dressed to knock out a fellow’s eye, unless—unless—
    “How long is it, Ray, since I’ve known you?”
    “More years than I’m going to admit, Prothero, that I’ve been gadding about with you boys as you come to town.”
    “I remember taking you to a baseball game in a feather boa that was one of the first I ever clapped eyes on. Remember, you helped me shop for one for the wife?”
    “Yes, it was purple. Got it at Pogue’s.”
    “All those years ago, and darned if I know one bit more about you now than I ever did, Ray. Good company. Girl, if ever there was one, that a fellow can turn to in a pinch; and yet—darned if I know.…”
    “If I didn’t know you for what I know you to be, I’d think you were trying to propose to me, or something.”
    “I am, Ray, trying to propose something.”
    “What’s on your mind, Prothero?”
    “Ray—would you sleep with a fellow—with me—”
    For answer, she drew back her hand slowly, without surprise, and swung it with a hollow-sounding bang against the narrow cheek of the narrow Mr. Prothero.

2
    Not but what every other man, sooner or later, by innuendo, had asked it. But never had anyone summed it up in the nasty little compact phrase that had issued from Prothero.
    The shocking, stark-naked phrase, coming, it is true, off lips that she had more than once allowed to kiss her, had robbed her of her usual