hstone
of the Western World, he knew from her own lips about her love for
Clive. He was the only person she ever told.

A few of her friends she asked to the house for quiet week-ends; the
impression their visits made upon her was pleasant but colourless.

And it seemed singular, as she thought it over, how subordinate, how
unaccented had always been all these people who came into her life,
lingered, and faded out of it, leaving only the impressions of
backgrounds and accessories against which only one figure stood clear
and distinct--her lover's.

Yes, of all men she had ever known, only Clive seemed real; and he
dominated every scene of her girlhood and her womanhood as her mother
had been the only really living centre of her childhood.

All else seemed to her like a moving and subdued background,--an
endless series of grey scenes vaguely painted through which figures
came and went, some shadowy and colourless as phantoms, some soberly
outlined, some delicately tinted--but all more or less subordinate,
more or less monochromatic, unimportant except for balance and
composition, as painters use indefinite shapes and shades so that the
eyes may more perfectly concentrate on the centre of their
inspiration.

And the centre of all, for her, was Clive. Since her mother's death
there had been no other point of view for her, no other focus for the
forces of her mind, no other real desire, no other content. He had
entered her child's life and had become, instantly, all that the
child-world held for her. And it was so through the years of her
girlhood. Absent, or during his brief reappearances, the central focus
of her heart and mind was Clive. And, in womanhood, all forces in her
mind and spirit and, now, of body, centred in this man who stood out
against the faded tapestry of the world all alone for her, the only
living thing on earth with which her heart had mated as a child, and
in which now her mind and spirit had found Nirvana.

All men, all women, seemed to have their shadowy being only to make
this man more real to her.

Friends came, remained, and went,--Cecil Reeve, gay, charmed with
everything, and, as always, mischievously ready to pay court to her;
Francis Hargrave, politely surprised but full of courteous admiration
for her good taste; John Lyndhurst, Grismer, Harry Ferris, Young
Welter, Arthur Ensart, and James Allys,--all were bidden for the day;
all came, marvelled in the several manners characteristic