'I mean what all the true, great hearts of the world have meant by it, poetry, rapture, religion; and they can only be sustained, renewed, created by emotion, by passion, by sexual passion if you like to call it by a name you imagine to be derogatory.' He felt himself warmed and sustained against the menace that emanated from her by the sound of his own familiar eloquence.

But Mrs. Dallas still tranquilly contemplated the carnations.

'That's the man's point of view. The view of the artist, the creator. Perhaps there's truth in it. Perhaps he can't write his poems and paint his pictures without taking intoxicants. But it will never be the view of the woman. Mary Shelley will never really like it when Shelley makes love to Jane Clairmont; Marian will never like it when you make love to me. They'll try to believe it's the ideal, to please him, when they are the ones he is in love with; but when he is in love with other women they won't go on believing it.'

"That is their fault, their littleness, then. The wide, glorious outlook is theirs, too, if they choose to open their eyes. I don't accept your antithesis for women,-humdrum respectability, roast mutton, milk pudding, or dissipation. I don't believe that when a woman marries and becomes a mother she must turn her back on love.'

Mrs. Dallas at this began to laugh, unkindly. "Turn her back on love? No indeed. Why should she? Can't she love her friends and her father and mother and sisters and brothers, as well as her husband and children? You idealists seem always to forget these means of expansion. By love you mean simply and solely the intoxicant. Call it poetry and religion, if you like, but don't expect other people, who merely see that you are intoxicated, to call it that.'

absently, with languid fingers, she seemed to be breaking his idols as though they had been silly little earthenware figures, not good enough-here was the stab, the bewilderment - for her drawing-room. And who was she to do it, this remote, mysterious creature, steeped in the perfume of her passionate past? He felt as he gazed at her that it was not only himself he must defend against her.

'It's curious to me to hear you talk in this way.' He armed himself, as he spoke, with all that he could muster of wisdom and of weight. 'You are the last woman I'd have expected to hear it from. You've made me your friend, so that I'd have a right to be frank, even if you had n't let me love you. What right have you to turn your back on all the beauty and romance of life

to smile and mock them? You have n't allowed yourself to be bandaged and crippled by convention, I'm sure of it. You have followed your heart -bravely, truly out into life. You have loved and loved and loved, - I know it. It breathes from you. It's all you've lived for.'

'And you think the result so satisfactory?' said Mrs. Dallas. She looked at him now, and if it was with irony it was with sadness. She turned from her question. 'Well, if you like, I am one of the femmes galantes; they are of many types, you know; I was n't thinking, when I shocked you so, of the obvious, gross type. I was thinking of the woman who corresponds to you- the idealist, the spiritual femme galante. And, I'm convinced of it, for a woman, it does n't work. A man, if he is a big man, or has a big life, it is n't always the same thing, by the way, may have his succession of passions, or, as you'd claim, and I don't believe it, — his contemporaneities; he has a context to frame them in; they may fall into place.

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in those terms of dimension. It is big enough for the emotion that leads to marriage and to the loves that grow from that, the loves you think so little of. It is an emotion that can't be repeated over and over again simply because, in a normal life, it has grown into something else, something even better, I should say: a form of poetry and rapture and religion quite compatable with roast mutton and respectability. But the women who miss the normal life and who try to live on the emotions, they -well, I can only say that to my mind they always come to look silly. Silly is the only word for them.'

'No, I've not hurt myself,' said Mrs. Dallas. 'I've been hurt, perhaps; but I've not allowed my hurts to repeat themselves too often. Some things in life should be unique and final. The people who don't keep them so become shoddy. Marian, for instance, is neither hard nor cold, nor shoddy, either. You have made one of the mistakes that idealists are always making in imagining that she was humdrum respectability and that I was poetry and rapture and religion. Oh, it's no good protesting. If I had a double chin and thin hair you'd never have wanted to help my soul, however unhappy I was. And if Marian had sat about in

'Why should I?' Mrs. Dallas asked. 'I'm not of the idealist type. I don't confuse intoxication with religion and think I have the one when I've only the other. I may have missed the real thing, but I've not repeated the emotion that ought to lead to it. You are quite mistaken in imagining that I've loved and loved and loved. I have n't. I have allowed other people to love me. That, as you'll own, is a very different matter. I am hard and cold and disillusioned. I am not soft and yearning and frustrated. Why should I look silly?'

He stared at her, and his heart was flooded with pain. What was she, then? What was her feeling for him? What had she meant? As she spoke and as he looked at her, the veil of romance dissolved from about her and he saw her for the first time with her own eyes, devoid of poetry, a hard, cold, faded, worldly woman. Yet she was still a Sphinx, strange and alluring, and still he struggled against her, for her, saying hotly, though his heart was chilled, 'If it's true, you've hurt yourself you've hurt yourself horribly, through fear of looking silly.'

mysterious and not let you feel sure that she cared about you, you would probably have remained in love with her. So, please own that you have been mistaken and that on the one side is love, the love that Marian feels for you, although she knows you; because she knows you; and on the other is illusion, intoxication; sensuality, yes, my dear Rupert, such as you felt when I let you kiss my hand a little while ago.'

He sat, sullen, even sulky, half turned from her, and again he stooped and gathered up the flakes of stone and tossed them away down the path.

The clink and chink of ice and glass was heard approaching through the drawing-room, and the maid stepped out bearing the tray, which she set down on a wicker table before her mistress. The tall crystal jug, veiled in frosty rime, showed tones of jade and chalcedony, and fillets of lemon peel threaded it like pale, bright enamel. This gem-like beaker, the plate of golden cakes, with the scent of the carnations, with Mrs. Dallas's little foot on its cushion, with her rings of pearl and ruby, had all been part of the magic she had meant to him. The very sound of the ice, dully yet resonantly chink

ing, brought a suffocating sense of nostalgia. It was over, all over. He was disenchanted. She was cruel to him, to him who had loved her. She had cut into him and killed bright, ingenuous, trustful things. And, in a placid voice, she asked him if he would have some cake, and filled his glass.

He took it from her and drank it off in silence. The icy, aromatic liquid seemed an antidote to that other intoxicant she had mocked. Irony flowed through his veins; a bitter-sweet sense of vengeful maturity. When he set

down the glass, he looked up at her, and he felt himself measuring his sword against the stiletto of an adversary.

"Well, I've had my lesson,' he said. 'I've been a generous but deluded idealist, it seems, in imagining that men and women are equals in their claims on life. Since I'm an artist, I have a right to my raptures, I take it. And poor Marian must be jealous with reason. Well, well; it's an odd morality to hear preached.'

Mrs. Dallas still sipped her lemonade and she quietly considered him. She said nothing, and even after she had finished and set down her glass she sat for still a little while in silence.

'I'm sorry I've seemed to preach,' she then remarked, 'but I certainly think that Marian has every right to be jealous. What more did I say? That a man is n't as ridiculous and undignified as a woman when he falls in and out of love-affairs on the condition that he has a big life? That was it, was n't it?'

"That was it, and I'm glad to have your assurance that you and I are in no danger of being ridiculous or undignified.'

'Do you mean,' said Mrs. Dallas, looking at him, 'that you think yours such a big life?'

It had been, before, his heart, its tenderness, its devotion and dedication that

she had cut into; it was into something deeper now, something more substantially and vitally at the centre of his life, something of which his heart and all its ardors were but tributaries. He was to learn that self-love could bleed with a fiercer, darker gush. The blood, as if foretelling his ordeal, sprang to his forehead as he looked back at her.

'I have my art,' he said, and he disdained any pretended humility; he spoke with pride and even with solemnity. 'I live for my art. I don't think that I am an insignificant man.'

you

call

'Don't you?' said Mrs. Dallas. It was with an unaffected curiosity that her eyes rested on him, and it sank into him, drop by drop, like poison. 'Not insignificant, perhaps,' she took up after a moment. "That's not quite the word, perhaps. You are very intelligent and appreciative and good-hearted. I don't suppose one can be quite insignificant if one is that. But do it art, your writing? I wonder. Oh, you are quite right to live for it, of course, just as other men do for stockbroking or fox-hunting or print-collecting, or anything else that employs their energies or satisfies their tastes or brings in money; but, to count as art, a man's activities must mean more than just his own satisfaction in them, must n't they? You write careful, intelligent, sentimental little books; but I can't feel that the world would be any the poorer if you were to take to stockbroking or fox-hunting instead. No, it does n't seem to me, my dear Rupert, that your life is nearly large enough for a succession of love-affairs. It's all right when one is young and looking for a mate; experiments are in order then; but you've found your mate, and you'll soon be not so very young, and if on the strength of your art you imagine yourself entitled to unseasonable intoxications, you'll become, in time, an emotional dram-drinker, one of

Stretched on his rack, broken, bleeding, Rupert stared at her. Who was this woman, this cruel, ambiguous woman who watched his agony with deliberating, drowsy eyes? There came into his mind the memory of a picture seen in childhood, some sentimental print that had strongly impressed his boyish sensibilities. A corner of a Roman amphitheatre, a rising tier of seats; sham architecture, sham Romans, no doubt, and a poor piece of claptrap looked back on from his maturity; but the face of the Roman woman, leaning so quietly forward under its gold tiara, to watch, unmoved, the tormented combatants below, was it not like this face? Yes, she was of that stony-hearted breed, unaltered by the centuries.

The torment of his humiliation snatched at anger for a veil. He said, smiling, 'You have been very successful till now in concealing your real opinion of me.'

"Have I concealed it?'

parasol in our orchard and you smiled at me!'

'I generally do at agreeable-looking young men when I see that they admire me,' Mrs. Dallas commented.

'Oh, don't pretend! Don't hide and shift!' He lifted fierce eyes. 'It was n't only that. You seemed to care. You seemed to need me. You made it easy inevitable. You came and came; and you asked me here again and again.'

66

"Not "me," us, Mrs. Dallas amended suavely. She was looking at him, all this time, with that thoughtful, poisonous curiosity; and as he now sat, finding for the moment no words, his fury baffled by her quiet checkmating, she went on, 'And afterwards I let you come alone because I saw that you admired me, and that is always pleasant to me. And when, at first, as you say, I showed myself so affable, it was because I liked Marian. I do still like her; more than I ever liked you, my dear Rupert; if you are good-hearted and intelligent, she is more so, and she has more sense of humor than you have, and does n't take herself so seriously. And, to be quite frank, since we are talk

Marian, but saw that she could be of use to me. I've had, in some ways, a tiresome, tangled life, and things have n't always gone as I wanted them to go, so that I don't let opportunities for strengthening and straightening here and there pass me by. Through Marian I met several people I wanted to meet and make sure of. People useful to me. I think Marian quite understood and quite wanted to help. She would. She is of my world in a sense you are n't, you know, my dear Rupert. And, in my idle way, I did take a good deal of trouble to be agreeable to her. It all turned out exceedingly well and I was very grateful to Marian. That's one reason, you see, why I felt to-day that our little

flirtation was going too far and must be put a stop to. I don't want Marian to be jealous of me; it would be distinctly inconvenient. But there is more in it than that. I would n't have put myself to this bother and talked things out like this if it had n't been because of my liking for Marian. It makes me angry to see that you don't know how lucky you are to have such a wife. I want you to see how very lucky you are. I want you to see yourself as others see

you, a very unimportant young man, without position and without money, married to a quite unusually delightful girl who has both. This is n't the young man's fault, of course; one would n't like him the less for it; but one does expect him to be aware of his own felicity. One does expect him to feel that, at present, his wife is too good for him. I don't mean in the conventional sense; one wouldn't ask him to recognize that; but in the sense of worth and charm and distinction, for those are the things he supposes himself to care for.'

She had, while she spoke of the 'young man' thus impartially, turned her eyes from him, and they rested again on the beds of carnations. The sun had sunk behind the hill, and though the bright soft colors were unshadowed, they all lay in a different light and seemed to glow coolly in their own radiance, like jewels.

Rupert rose. His anger had passed from him. He no longer felt Mrs. Dallas to be an antagonist; but he felt her to be a stranger; and he felt himself to be a stranger. A sense of fear and loneliness and disembodiment had fallen upon him while he listened to her. He held out his hand to her. 'Good-bye,' he said. 'I think I must be going.'

She took his hand and looked up at him with the gaze so remote, so irrevocable. 'Good-bye,' she said; 'I hope to see you and Marian some day soon, perhaps.'

The words, with their quiet relapse on convention, made him feel himself in a new world. He had been thinking of final, fatal things, things dark and trenchant; she showed him compromise, continuity, commonplace good sense; and, dispossessed, bereft as he was, something in him struggled to place itself beside her in this alien atmosphere, to make itself a denizen of the new since he had forever lost the old world.

'Oh yes, I'll tell her,' he said. And as he released her hand he found, "Thank you. I'm sure you meant it all most kindly.'

'It's very nice of you to say so,' said Mrs. Dallas, smiling.

It was the world of convention; yet with all his bewildered groping for clues and footholds he felt, dimly, as a glimmer before his eyes or a frail thread in his hands, that the smile was perhaps the most sincerely sweet that he had ever had from Mrs. Dallas. It was as if she saw his struggle and commended it.

III

He walked away, up the steps, across the putting-green and out into the woods. He went slowly as he began the gradual ascent. He felt very tired, as though he had been beaten with rods, and there was in him a curious mingling of confusion and lucidity, of pain and contemplation. The present and the future were curtained with shame, uncertainty, and dismay; but the past was vivid, and, like a singular, outgrown husk, he seemed to look back at that Rupert on the veranda, so blind, so bland, so fatuous, and to see him as Mrs. Dallas had seen him.

Beyond the curtain was Marian. He knew that he went toward Marian as if toward safety and succor; yet all was opaque before his eyes, for who was it that Marian was to succor but that