e in cities have no ears to
hear."

"Are you a thousand years old, Marie-Louise?"

"I am as old as the centuries," she told him gravely. "I played with Pan
when the world was young."

They smiled at each other, and then he said, "My mother wants me to live
in the country. Do you think if I were there I should hear Pan pipe?"

"Not if you were there because your mother wished it. It is only when you
love it yourself that the river calls and you hear the fluting of the
wind in the rushes."

It was an August Saturday, hot and humid. Marie-Louise was in thin white,
but it was a white with a difference from the demure summer frocks of a
former generation. The modern note was in the white fur which came high
up about Marie-Louise's throat. Yet she did not look warm. Her skin was
as pale as the pearls in her ears. Her red hair flamed, but without
warmth; it rippled back from her forehead to a cool and classic coil.

"If you marry your Eve," she told Richard, "and stay with father, you'll
grow rich and fat, and forget the state of your soul."

"I thought you didn't believe in souls."

She flushed faintly. "I believe in yours. But your Eve doesn't. She likes
you because you don't care, and everybody else does. And that isn't
love."

"What is love?"

She pondered. "I don't know. I've never felt it. And I don't want to feel
it. If I loved too much I should die--and if I didn't love enough I
should be ashamed."

"You are a queer child, Marie-Louise."

"I am not a child. Dad thinks I am, and mother. But they don't know."

There were day lilies growing about the sun-dial. She gathered a handful
of white blooms and laid them at the feet of the piping Pan. "I shall
write a poem about it," she said, "of a girl who loved a marble god, and
who found it--enough. Every day she laid a flower at his feet. And a
human came to woo her, and she told him, 'If I loved you, you would ask
more of me than my marble lover. He asks only that I lay flowers at his
feet.'"

He could never be sure whether she was in jest or earnest. And now she
narrowed her eyes in a quizzical smile and was gone.

He spoke of Marie-Louise to Eve. "She hasn't enough to do. She ought to
be busy with her fancy work and her household matters."

"No woman is busy with household matters in this age, Dicky. Nor with
fancy work. Is that what you expect of a wife?"

He didn't know what he expected, and he told her so. But he knew he was
expecting more than she