The Fascinating Stranger and Other Stories/Ladies’ Ways

LADIES’ WAYSTWO young people, just out of college and pleasing to the eye, ought to appreciate the advantage of living across the street from each other: but Miss Muriel Eliot’s mood, that summer, was so advanced and intellectual that she found all round about her only a cultural desert, utterly savourless. This was her own definition of her surroundings, and when she expressed herself thus impressively to Mr. Renfrew Mears, the young gentleman who lived directly opposite her, he was granted little choice but to suppose himself included among the unspiced vacancies she mentioned. “The whole deadly environment crushes me,” she told him, as they paused at her gate on returning from a walk. “This town is really a base thing.”
“Do you think so, Muriel?” he said. “Well, I don’t know; around here it’s a right pleasant place to live—nice big yards and trees and all. And you know the population is increasing by fifteen to twenty thousand every year. The papers say——”
“Listen, Renfrew,” she interrupted, and then said deliberately: “It is a cultural desert, utterly savourless!”
When she had spoken in this way, the first feeling of young Mr. Mears appeared to be one of admiration, and perhaps

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