now. I have kept you up
long enough."

He was about to raise her hand to his lips when she surprised him by
shaking his warmly.

"I must get over that habit. It is rather absurd in this country where
you have not the custom. But you will come again?"

"Oh, yes, I'll come again."

XII

Madame Zattiany adjusted the chain on the front door and returned very
slowly to the library. That broad placid brow, not the least of her
physical charms, was drawn in a puzzled frown. Instead of turning out
the lights she sat down and stared into the dying fire. Suddenly she
began to laugh, a laugh of intense and ironic amusement; but it stopped
in mid-course and her eyes expanded with an expression of
consternation, almost of panic.

She was not alarmed for the peace of mind of the man who was more in
love with her than he had so far admitted to himself. She had been
loved by too many men and had regarded their heartaches and balked
desires with too profound an indifference to worry over the possible
harm she might be inflicting upon the brilliant and ambitious young man
who had precipitated himself into her life. That might come later, but
not at this moment when she was shaken and appalled.

She had dismissed from her mind long ago the hope or the desire that
she could ever again feel anything but a keen mental response to the
most provocative of men. No woman had ever lived who was more
completely disillusioned, more satiated, more scornful of that age-old
dream of human happiness, which, stripped to its bones, was merely the
blind instinct of the race to survive. Civilization had heaped its
fictions over the bare fact of nature's original purpose, imagination
lashing generic sexual impulse to impossible demands for the consummate
union of mind and soul and body. Mutuality! When man was essentially
polygamous and woman essentially the vehicle of the race. When the
individual soul had been decreed by the embittered gods eternally to
dwell alone and never yet had been tricked beyond the moment of nervous
exaltation into the belief that it had fused into its mate. Life
itself was futile enough, but that dream of the perfect love between
two beings immemorially paired was the most futile and ravaging of all
the dreams civilization had imposed upon mankind. The curse of
imagination. Only the savages and the ignorant masses understood
"love" for the transitory functional thing it was and were undisturbed
by