emanded curiously. "You could get the best
cigars from Cuba." He explained, and she regarded him impatiently. "Can't
you realize what possibilities you have!"

"I might, with assistance."

"If you once saw the world! I've been reading about Paris, the avenues and
cafes and theaters. Why, in the cafes there they drink only champagne and
dance all night. The women come with their lovers in little closed
carriages, and go back to little closed rooms hung in brocade. They never
wear anything but evening clothes, for they are never out but at
night--satin gowns with trains and bare shoulders."

He endeavored to picture himself in such a city, amid such a life, with
Meta Beggs. He felt that she would be entirely in place in the little
carriages, drinking champagne. "That's where they eat frogs," he remarked
inanely. In the tensity of her feeling, the bitterness of her longing, her
envy, she cursed him for a dull fool. Then, recovering her composure with
a struggle:

"I would make a man drunk with pleasure in a place like that. He would be
proud of me, and all the other men would hate him; they would all want
me."

"Some would come pretty near getting you, too," he replied with a flash of
penetration; "those with the fastest horses or longest pockets."

"I would be true to whoever took me there," she declared; "out of
gratitude."

He drew a deep breath. "What would you say," he inquired, leaning toward
her, "to a trip to--to Richmond? We could be gone the best part of a
week."

She laughed scornfully. "Do you think I am as cheap as that--to be bought
over Sunday?" She rose, and stood before him, sharply outlined against the
foliage, the water, the momentary, flittering insects, taunting,
provocative, sensual.

"Five years ago," he told her, "if you had tried this foolery, I would
have choked you, and thrown what was left in the dam."

"And now--" she jeered fearlessly.

"It's different," he admitted moodily.

It was. Somewhere the lash had been lost from the whip of his desire. He
was still eager, tormented by the wish to feel her disdainful mouth
against his. The recrudescence of spring burned in his veins; but, at the
same time, there was a new reluctance upon his flesh. The inanimate, obese
mask of the priest, Lettice's sleeping countenance faintly stamped with
pain, hovered in his consciousness. "It's different," he repeated.

"You are losing your hold on pleasure," she observed critically aloof.

He lean