or in the next. I am not
meddling with theology but it seems to me that in the Elysian fields
she'll have her place in a very special company."

All this in a sympathetic voice and in his unmoved manner. Blunt
produced another disturbing white flash and muttered:

"I should say mixed." Then louder: "As for instance . . . "

"As for instance Cleopatra," answered Mills quietly. He added after a
pause: "Who was not exactly pretty."

"I should have thought rather a La Valliere," Blunt dropped with an
indifference of which one did not know what to make. He may have begun
to be bored with the subject. But it may have been put on, for the whole
personality was not clearly definable. I, however, was not indifferent.
A woman is always an interesting subject and I was thoroughly awake to
that interest. Mills pondered for a while with a sort of dispassionate
benevolence, at last:

"Yes, Dona Rita as far as I know her is so varied in her simplicity that
even that is possible," he said. "Yes. A romantic resigned La Valliere
. . . who had a big mouth."

I felt moved to make myself heard.

"Did you know La Valliere, too?" I asked impertinently.

Mills only smiled at me. "No. I am not quite so old as that," he said.
"But it's not very difficult to know facts of that kind about a
historical personage. There were some ribald verses made at the time,
and Louis XIV was congratulated on the possession--I really don't
remember how it goes--on the possession of:

". . . de ce bec amoureux
Qui d'une oreille a l'autre va,
Tra la la.

or something of the sort. It needn't be from ear to ear, but it's a fact
that a big mouth is often a sign of a certain generosity of mind and
feeling. Young man, beware of women with small mouths. Beware of the
others, too, of course; but a small mouth is a fatal sign. Well, the
royalist sympathizers can't charge Dona Rita with any lack of generosity
from what I hear. Why should I judge her? I have known her for, say,
six hours altogether. It was enough to feel the seduction of her native
intelligence and of her splendid physique. And all that was brought home
to me so quickly," he concluded, "because she had what some Frenchman has
called the 'terrible gift of familiarity'."

Blunt had been listening moodily. He nodded assent.

"Yes!" Mills' thoughts were still dwelling in the past. "And when
saying good-bye she could put in an instant an immense distance between
he