casions.'

"I again wavered--allusions to these eventful occasions seemed to
portend grief to her and pain incidentally to me.

"I caught her wrist as it turned the handle of the wardrobe door, and
remonstrated. 'I refuse to see them; I know nothing of clothes and I'm
not a detective, I won't pry into your past secrets, either of sorrow or
of joy.'

"Her hand shook in my clasp.

"'Don't stop me,' she cried, imperatively. 'Help me--I want you to know
them.'

"'So be it,' I said, and pushed back the door. Then she suddenly flung
herself in front of it, between me and the row of dainty frocks and
shimmering laces. She looked like Cassandra--in a soft, yellowy flannel
gown with loose sleeves falling away from her pink arms that blushed
with the heaving blood in her warm breasts--like Cassandra guarding the
gate of a citadel, though her lips said in a tone richer than wine,
sweeter than music, 'Kiss me first.'"

There was a long pause--Yeldham sat blankly staring at the coals, and I
gazed intently into the mists of nicotine that curled upwards to the
ceiling. Through them I could conjure a vision of her bronzed coronal
and Aubrey's massive muscularity, and could picture her glowing arms
around his neck--a convolvulus entwining a Gothic column.

"There are some kisses," he said presently, "that are worth the whole
sum of human pleasure. Pleasure! Faugh!--a rotten word--belonging to
those who only half live!"

He handled a cigarette mechanically and lit it.

"Well," he continued, "the first dress was white. A virginal thing of
simple gauze and flummery, with a frontage of puffings to make up for
bust development. Quite a girl's dress. Women, you know, are less
generous in the matter of--chiffon, don't they call it?--and more so in
the matter of flesh. It was her debut dress--I supposed--but she
contradicted.

"'No,' she explained, 'not quite that. One's debut is a hazy affair: all
excitement, wonder, blush, and clumsiness, with little or no enjoyment.
Yet how many of us would give the long, grey end of life for that first
night's dappling of peach bloom? It was the frock I wore on the evening
I first met my husband.'

"She spoke his name with a dull accent of grief, and I buried myself
amongst the flippery. Her kiss was moist on my lips, and I had no taste
for allusions to the dead man.

"The next thing was a riding habit--torn across the skirt.

"'A cropper,' I remarked; 'and enjoyed, or this memento would sc