r head.

"A lady! Women seem such mysterious creatures to me. I don't know them.
Did you abuse her? Did she--how did you say that?--unfold her petals,
too? Was she really and truly . . .?"

"She is simply perfection in her way and the conversation was by no means
banal. I fancy that if your late parrot had heard it, he would have
fallen off his perch. For after all, in that Allegre Pavilion, my dear
Rita, you were but a crowd of glorified _bourgeois_."

She was beautifully animated now. In her motionless blue eyes like
melted sapphires, around those red lips that almost without moving could
breathe enchanting sounds into the world, there was a play of light, that
mysterious ripple of gaiety that seemed always to run and faintly quiver
under her skin even in her gravest moods; just as in her rare moments of
gaiety its warmth and radiance seemed to come to one through infinite
sadness, like the sunlight of our life hiding the invincible darkness in
which the universe must work out its impenetrable destiny.

"Now I think of it! . . . Perhaps that's the reason I never could feel
perfectly serious while they were demolishing the world about my ears. I
fancy now that I could tell beforehand what each of them was going to
say. They were repeating the same words over and over again, those great
clever men, very much like parrots who also seem to know what they say.
That doesn't apply to the master of the house, who never talked much. He
sat there mostly silent and looming up three sizes bigger than any of
them."

"The ruler of the aviary," I muttered viciously.

"It annoys you that I should talk of that time?" she asked in a tender
voice. "Well, I won't, except for once to say that you must not make a
mistake: in that aviary he was the man. I know because he used to talk
to me afterwards sometimes. Strange! For six years he seemed to carry
all the world and me with it in his hand. . . . "

"He dominates you yet," I shouted.

She shook her head innocently as a child would do.

"No, no. You brought him into the conversation yourself. You think of
him much more than I do." Her voice drooped sadly to a hopeless note.
"I hardly ever do. He is not the sort of person to merely flit through
one's mind and so I have no time. Look. I had eleven letters this
morning and there were also five telegrams before midday, which have
tangled up everything. I am quite frightened."

And she explained to me that one o