now how to use and are therefore so much
the more dangerous, since every weapon to the primitive mind is a weapon
of offense. Had I been Lord Saxby instead of Michael Fane, I could have
proved my theory on the grand scale, and obviously the grand scale even
for a gentleman is the only scale that is any good nowadays."

"I wonder if you could," murmured Stella. "Anyway, I don't see why you
shouldn't ultimately attain to the grand scale, if you begin with the
small scale."

"But the small scale means just a passive existence that hurts nobody
and fades out of memory at the moment of death," Michael grumbled.

"Well, if your theory of necessary ornaments is valid," Stella pointed
out, "you'll find your niche."

"I shall be a sort of Prescott. That's the most I can hope for," Michael
gloomily announced. "Yet after all that's pretty good."

Stella looked at him in surprise, and said that though she had known
Michael liked Prescott, she had no idea he had created such an
atmosphere of admiration. She was eager to find out what Michael most
esteemed in him, and she plied him indeed with so many questions that he
finally asked her if she did not approve of Prescott.

"Of course I approve of him. No one could accept a refusal so
wonderfully without being approved. But naturally I wanted to find out
your opinion of him. What could be more interesting to a girl than to
know the judgment of others on a person she might have married?"

Michael gazed at her in astonishment and demanded her reason for keeping
such an extraordinary event so secret.

"Because I didn't want to introduce an atmosphere of curiosity into your
relationship with him. You know, Michael, that if I had told you, you
would always have been examining him when you thought he wasn't looking.
And of course I never told mother, who would have examined him through
her lorgnettes whether he were looking or not."

It seemed strange to Michael, as he and Stella sat here with the
woodland enclosing them, that she could so fearlessly accept or refuse
what life offered. And yet he supposed the ability to do so made of her
the artist she was. Thinking of her that night, as he sat up reading in
the clock-charmed room where lately she had played him through the dawn
of the English Constitution, he told himself that even this cottage
which so essentially became them both, was the result of Stella's appeal
to Raoul de Castera-Verduzan, an appeal in which his own personal