t she could draw her face into
the deepest shadow in the room. She made the arrangement
almost instinctively, and the lines of intensity the last
week had drawn upon Cardiffs face were her first reward.

"I have come to ask you to give up this thing," he said.

Elfrida leaned forward a little in her favorite attitude,
clasping her knee. Her eyes were widely serious. "You
ask me to give it up?" she repeated slowly. "But why do
you ask me?"

"Because I cannot associate it with you--to me it is
impossible that you should do it."

Elfrida lifted her eyebrows a little. "Do you know why
I am doing it?" she asked.

"I think so."

"It is not a mere escapade, you understand. And these
people do not pay me anything. That is quite just, because
I have never learned to act and I haven't much voice. I
can take no part, only just--appear."

"_Appear!_" Cardiff exclaimed. "Have you appeared!"

"Seven times," Elfrida said simply, but she felt that
she was blushing.

Cardiff's anger rose up hotly within him, and strove with
his love, and out of it there came a sickening sense of
impotency which assailed his very soul. All his life he
had had tangibilities to deal with. This was something
in the air, and already he felt the apprehension of being
baffled here, where he wrought for his heart and his
future.

"So that is a part of it," he said, with tightened lips.
"I did not know."

"Oh, I insisted upon that," Elfrida replied softly. "I
am quite one of them--one of the young ladies of the
Peach Blossom Company. I am learning all their sensations,
their little frailties, their vocabulary, their ways of
looking at things. I know how the novice feels when she
makes her first appearance in the chorus of a
spectacle--I've noted every vibration of her nerves. I'm
learning all the little jealousies and intrigues among
them, and all their histories and their ambitions. They
are more moral than you may think, but it is not the
moral one who is the most interesting. Her virtue is
generally a very threadbare, common sort of thing.
The--others--have more color in the fabric of their lives,
and you can't think how picturesque their passions are.
One of the chorus girls has two children. I feel a brute
sometimes at the way she--" Elfrida broke off, and looked
out of the window for an instant. "She brings their little
clothes into my bedroom to make--though there is no need,
they are in an asylum. She is divorced from their father,"