are!

"I saw Fontaine sending flowers to his wife. He'd been at
Athalie's all the evening. There are only two occasions on
which a man sends flowers to his wife; one of them is when
he's in love with her.

"Aren't we the last word in scuts? Custom-ridden,
habit-cursed, afraid, eternally afraid of something--of our
own sort always, and of their opinions. And that offering of
flowers when the man who sends them hopes to do something of
which he is ashamed, or has already done it!

"How I do run on! In _vino veritas_--there's some class to
pickled truth! Here are olives for thought, red peppers for
honesty, onions for logic--and cauliflower for constancy--and
fifty-seven other varieties, Clive--all absent in the canned
make-up of the modern man.

"'When you and I behind the veil have passed'--but they don't
wear veils now; and now is our chance.

"We'll never take it. Hall-marks are our only guide. When
absent we merely become vicious. We know what we want; we
know what we ought to have; but we're too cowardly to go
after it. And so are you. And so am I.
"Yours--
"REEVE."

CHAPTER XVIII

During that first year Athalie Greensleeve saw a great deal of New
York society, professionally, and of many New York men, socially.

But the plaything which society attempted to make of her she gently
but adroitly declined to become. She herself drew this line whenever
it was necessary to draw it, never permitting herself to mistake the
fundamental attitude of these agreeable and amicably demonstrative
people toward her, or toward any girl who lived alone in New York and
who practised such a profession.

Not among the people who employed her and who paid her lavishly for an
evening's complacency; not among people who sought her at her own
place during business hours for professional advice or for lighter
amusement could she expect any other except professional recognition.

And after a few months of wistful loneliness she came, gradually, to
desire from these people nothing except what they gave.

But there were some people she met during that first year's practice
of her new profession who seemed to be unimpressed by the popular
belief in such an awesome actuality as New York "society." And some of
these, oddly enough, were the descendants of those who, perhaps,