e."

"Well, then, I should."

"As much as you are with 'Lena?"

"I should have been madder about you than I have been about any woman
for fifteen years."

"If you know that, how can you help it now?"

"There is such a thing as honour in men."

"That means that there is none in women? Well, I don't believe there is.
But honour does not keep a man from loving a woman."

He made no reply.

"Does it?"

"Are you mad about fire? Or is it your vanity that is insatiable?"

Again he met her eyes. And this time her face was as white as her gown.
Her bosom was heaving. Her skin was translucent. To Trennahan's suffused
vision she seemed bathed in white fire.

"I love you," he said hoarsely; "and I would give all the soul I've got
to have met you a year ago."

XIII

Talk about the complex heart of a woman. It is nothing to that of a man.

Trennahan had loved a good many women in a good many ways. Perhaps he
understood women as well as any man of his day: he had been bred by
women of the world, and his errant fancy had occasionally sent him into
other strata. He also thought that he knew himself. His mind, his heart,
his senses, the best and the worst in him, had been engaged so often and
so actively that he could have drawn diagrams of each, alone or in
combination, with accommodating types of woman. He also, without
generalising too freely, knew men, and he had spent ten years of his
life in diplomacy. But he now stood before himself as puzzled as he was
aghast.

If his grip upon himself had suddenly relaxed, and he had spent a wild
night with the wild young men of San Francisco, he should not have been
particularly surprised: he had been living on an exalted plane for the
last ten months. But that he loved Magdalena with the love of his life,
that he realised in her some vague youthful ideal, that she was the
woman created for the better part of him, that his highest happiness was
to be found in her, he had never doubted from the minute he had finished
his long communion with himself and determined to marry her. And every
moment he had spent with her had strengthened the tie. Nothing about her
but had pleased him: her intellect, her pride, her reticence, her
difference from other women; even, after the first shock to his taste
was over, her lack of beauty. It was true that she had no great power
over his pulses, but he was tired of his pulses. She appealed to his
tenderness and deeper affections as no w