s now burning luridly in Jenny's heart.

Chapter XXVIII: _St. Valentine's Eve_

The supper at the Trocadero only marked the first of many such evenings
spent in the company of Irene and the two brothers. However much one
side of Jenny's character might despise Jack Danby, to another side he
was strangely soothing. When she was beside Maurice, every moment used
to be haunted by its own ghost, bitter-sweet with the dread of finality.
Danby's effect was that of a sedative drug whose action, however
grateful at the time, is loathed in retrospect, until deprivation renews
desire. Jenny found herself longing to sit near him and was fretful in
his absence because, not being in love with him, he did not occupy her
meditations pleasantly. He was worth nothing to her without the sense of
contact. He was a bad habit: under certain conditions of opportunity in
association he might become a vice.

Evolution, in providence for the perpetuation of the species, has kept
woman some thousands of years nearer to animals than man. Hence their
inexplicableness to the majority of the opposite sex. Men have built up
a convention of fastidious woman to flatter their own sexual rivalry.
Woman is relinquished as a riddle when she fails to conform to masculine
standards of behavior. Man is accustomed to protest that certain
debased--or rather highly specialized--types of his own sex are
unreasonably attractive. He generally fails to perceive that when a
woman cannot find a man who is able to stimulate her imagination, she
often looks for another who will gratify her senses.

Maurice was never the lover corresponding most nearly with an ideal of
greensick maiden dreams. Jenny's sensibility had not been stultified by
these emotional ills, so that when he crossed her horizon, she loved him
sanely without prejudice. She made him sovereign of her destiny because
he seemed to her fit for power. He completely satisfied her imagination;
and, having made a woman of her, he left a libertine to reap what he had
sown.

Jack Danby possessed the sly patience of an accomplished rake. He never
alarmed Jenny with suggestions of escort, with importunity of embraces.
His was the stealthy wooing of inactivity and smoldering eyes. He would
let slip no occasion for interpreting life to the disadvantage of
virtue; he was always sensually insistent. He and his brother, offspring
of a lady's maid and an old demirep, owed to their inheritance of a
scabrous li