d there
were hints of elderly exhortation to tread more primly the paths which
were deemed maidenly. Yet from these tattered scraps of life and
outlook, we could piece together some concept of her soul fabric. This
girl was woven of pure silk, but not of flimsy silk; there were strength
and softness--resoluteness and tenderness--a warp and woof for the loom
of noble things--and charm. Often I felt as though I were invading a
temple in which I had no place as communicant, and into whose fanes and
outer areas I should wish to come reverently, with the shoes of my
grosser soul in my hands. One night she had been sitting in the
moonlight on the beach, and the sea had talked to her. What she wrote
that night was pure poetry. I shall not try to reproduce it from my
faulty memory. My heavy masculine hand would mar its gossamer beauty.
One might as well undertake to restore the iridescent subtleties of a
broken bubble. On this occasion she was thinking of the mysterious man
she had so quaintly idealized. Had the lucky beggar, whoever he was,
read those lines he must have felt that, in the lists of life, there
rested on him the sacred obligation to bear a spotless shield and a true
lance. She transcribed as one to whom the magic and delicate nuances of
life are revealed. Besides these passages there were others sparkling
with the merriment of spontaneous humor. Our writer was no Lady
Dolorosa. She was as many-sided and many-hued as the diamond whose
facets break light into color. She frankly admitted to these pages,
intended only for herself, that she was beautiful, though she wished
that her eyes were blue instead of gray-brown, and that her type were
different. Evidently she had cut her teeth on compliment and fed from
childhood on that type of admiration which beauty exacts. She seemed to
be a little hungry for tributes of a different and deeper sort. In her
society days, as in the more youthful period, we found frequent
references to the unnamed man who still held his undeserved and
paramount place as an idealized personality; a human touchstone by which
she tested the intrinsicness of other men--always to the detriment of
those on trial.

CHAPTER V

PREMONITIONS BECOME REALITIES

At last, running back to the start, we tracked him down and with his
discovery came disappointment. I had realized that she had been dressing
a mere lay-figure in garments of idealized manhood and endowing an
unknown with a panoply of t