ot pleased, but Janet found a tone in his voice
that told her the impression of Elfrida had not been
altogether distasteful.

"_Fin de siecle_," he said.

"Perhaps," Janet answered, looking out of the window, "a
little _fin de siecle_."

"Did you notice," asked Lawrence Cardiff, "that she didn't
tell you where she was living?"

"Didn't she? Neither she did. But we can easily find out
from John Kendal."

CHAPTER XIV.

Kendal hardly admitted to himself that his acquaintance
with Elfrida had gone beyond the point of impartial
observation. The proof of its impartiality, if he had
thought of seeking it, would have appeared to him to lie
in the fact that he found her, in her personality, her
ideas, and her effects, to be damaged by London. The
conventionality--Kendal's careless generalization
preferred a broad term--of the place made her extreme
in every way, and it had recently come to be a conclusion
with him that English conventionality, in moderation,
was not wholly to be smiled at. Returning to it, its
protectiveness had impressed him strongly, and he had a
comforting sense of the responsibility it imposed upon
society. Paris and the Quartier stood out against it in
his mind like something full of light and color and
transient passion on the stage--something to be remembered
with recurrent thrills of keen satisfaction and to be
seen again. It had been more than this, he acknowledged,
for he had brought out of it an element that lightened
his life and vitalized his work, and gave an element of
joyousness to his imagination--it was certain that he
would go back there. And Miss Bell had been in it and
of it--so much in it and of it that he felt impatient
with her for permitting herself to be herself in any
other environment. He asked himself why she could not
see that she was crudely at variance with all color and
atmosphere and law in her present one, and he speculated
as to the propriety of telling her so, of advising her
outright as to the expediency in her own interest, of
being other than herself in London. That was what it
came to, he reflected in deciding that he could not--if
the girl's convictions and motives and aims were real;
and he was beginning to think they were real. And although
he had found himself at liberty to say to her things that
were harder to hear, he felt a curious repugnance to
giving her any inkling of what he thought about this.
It would be a hideous thing to do, he conclud