gave a short barking laugh. "Your arrogance is the most
magnificent thing about you, and that is saying more than I could
otherwise express. I'll fortify myself before you proceed further, if
you will permit." He poured himself out a drink, and returned to his
chair with the glass in his hand. "Pray go on."

She had not turned her head and continued to look into the fire. She
might have been posing to a sculptor for a bust that would hardly look
more like marble when finished.

"I soon discovered that I had not found happiness. Men want. They
rarely love. I realized that I had demanded in love far more than
passion, and I received nothing else.

"I am not going to tell you how many lovers I have had. It is none of
your business----"

"Ah!" Clavering, staring at her, had forgotten his first shock,
everything but her living presence; forgotten also that he had once
apprehended something of the sort, then dismissed it from his mind. He
spilt the whiskey over the arm of the chair, then sprang to his feet and
began to pace the room once more.

She went on calmly: "Disappointment does not mean the end of
seeking. . . . They gave me little that I wanted. They were clever and
adroit enough in the prelude. They knew how to create the illusion that
in them alone could be found the fulfillment of all aspiration and
desire. No doubt they satisfied many women, but they could not satisfy
me. They gave me little I did not find in the mere society of the many
brilliant and accomplished men with whom I was surrounded. I had a
rapacious mind, and there was ample satisfaction for it in the men who
haunted my salon and were constantly to be met elsewhere. European men
are _instruits_. They are interested in every vital subject,
intellectual and political, despite the itch of amor, their deliberate
cult of sex. They like to talk. Conversation is an art. My mind was
never uncompanioned. But that deeper spiritual rapacity, one offspring
of passion as it may be, they could not satisfy; for love with them is
always too confused with animalism and is desiccated in the art of
love-making. Fidelity is a virtue relegated to the bourgeois----"

"What about Englishmen?" demanded Clavering sarcastically. "I thought
they were bad artists but real lovers."

"I know little of Englishmen. Zattiany was never appointed to St.
James's, and although, of course, I met many of them in the service on
the continent, and even vis