ndship. And you must admit that I have done
nothing----"

"Oh, no, you have done nothing. You've only to be." He wondered that
he felt no desire to touch her. She looked lovely and appealing and
very young. But she radiated power, and that chin could not melt.

He asked abruptly: "How many men have you had in love with you?"

"Oh!" She spread out her hands vaguely. "How can one remember?" And
that look he most disliked, that look of ancient wisdom, disillusioned
and contemptuous, came into her eyes.

"You are too young to have had so very many. And the war took a good
slice out of your life. I don't suppose you were infatuating
smashed-up men or even doctors and surgeons."

"Certainly not. But, when one marries young--and one begins to live
early in Europe."

"How often have you loved, yourself?"

"That question I could answer specifically, but I shall not."

He calculated rapidly. "Four years of war. Assuming that you are
thirty-two, although sometimes you look older and sometimes younger,
and that you married at seventeen, that would leave you--well, eleven
years before the war began. I suppose you didn't fall in love once a
year?"

"Oh, no, I am a faithful soul. Say three years and a third to each
attack."

"You talk at times singularly like an American for one who left here at
the age of two."

"Remember that my family went with me. Moreover, Mary and I always
talked English together--American if you like. She was intensely proud
of being an American. We read all the American novels, as I told you.
They are an education in the idiom, permanent and passing. Moreover, I
was always meeting Americans."

"Were you? Well, the greater number of them must be in New York at the
present moment. No doubt they would be glad to relieve your
loneliness."

"I am not in the least lonely and I have not the least desire to see
any of them. Only one thing would induce me--if I thought it would be
possible to raise a large amount of money for the women and children of
Austria."

"Ah! You would take the risk, then?"

"Risk? They were the most casual acquaintances. They probably have
forgotten me long since. I had not left Hungary for a year before the
war, and one rarely meets an American in Pesth Society--two or three
other American women had married Hungarians, but they preferred Vienna
and I preferred Europeans. I knew them only slightly. . . . Moreover,
there are many Zattianys. It i