evil admired him because he made evil wonderful. To the perverse he was
almost as a god.

Miss Van Tuyn was an admirer of Dick Garstin. She thought him a great
painter, but apart from his gift his mind interested her intensely. He
had a sort of melancholy understanding of human nature and of life,
a strangely sure instinct in probing to the bottom of psychological
mysteries, a cruelly sure hand in tearing away the veils which the
victims hoped would shroud their weaknesses and sins. These gifts made
her brain respect him, and tickled her youthful curiosity. It was really
for Dick that she had specially wished Lady Sellingworth to join the
Georgians that night. And now, in her secret vexation, she was moved to
speak of the once famous Edwardian.

"Have you ever heard of Lady Sellingworth?" she said, leaning her elbow
on the marble table in front of her, and bending towards Dick Garstin so
that he might hear her through the uproar.

He finished one more chartreuse and turned his small black eyes upon
her. Pin-points of piercing light gleamed in them. He lifted his large,
coarse and capable painter's hand to his lips, put his cigar stump
between them, inhaled a quantity of smoke, blew it out through his hairy
nostrils, and then said in a big bass voice:

"Never. Why should I have? I hate society women."

Miss Van Tuyn suppressed a smile at the absurd and hackneyed phrase,
which reminded her of picture papers. For a moment she thought of Dick
Garstin as a sort of inverted snob. But she wanted something from him,
so she pursued her conversational way, and inflicted upon him a rapid
description of Lady Sellingworth, as she had been and as she was,
recording the plunge from artificial youth into perfectly natural
elderliness which had now, to her thinking, become definite old age.

The painter gave her a sort of deep and melancholy attention, keeping
the two pin-points of light directed steadily upon her.

"Did you ever know a woman doing such a thing as that, Dick?" she asked.
"Did you ever know of a woman clinging to her youth, and then suddenly,
in a moment, flinging all pretence of it away from her?"

He did not trouble, or perhaps did not choose, to answer her question,
but instead made the statement:

"She had been thrown off by some lover. In a moment of furious despair,
thinking all was over for her for ever, she let everything go. And
then she hadn't the cheek to try to take any of it back. She hadn't the
_