oman had done. Above all, she
had given him peace of mind; and she held his future in her hands.

And now?

Helena Belmont was that most dangerous rival of other women,--a girl
whom men loved desperately with no attendant loss of self-respect.
Whatever their passion, they felt a keen personal delight in the purity
of her mind; and they admired themselves the more that they appreciated
her cleverness. She was not only a woman to love but to idolise; she
gave even these prosaic San Francisco youths vague promptings to
distinguish themselves by some great and noble action, sending her
shafts straight through the American brain to those dumb inherited
instincts which had straggled down through the centuries from mediaeval
ancestors. Her very selfishness--which she was pleased to call
Paganism--charmed them: it was one of the divine rights of the woman
born to rule men and to create a happiness for one unimagined by lesser
women. No man but idealised her, unfanciful as he might be, not so much
for her beauty or gifts, or for all combined, as because when she gave
herself it would be for the last as it was for the first time. As the
reader knows, there was nothing ideal about Helena. Even her
fastidiousness was natural in view of her upbringing. She was a most
practical young flirt, with a very distinct intention of having her own
way as long as she lived. The wealth and petting and adulation which had
surrounded her from birth had made a thorough-going egoist of her,
albeit a most charming one; for she was warm-hearted, impulsive,
generous, and kind--in her own way. Naturally the men for whom her
lovely eyes beamed welcome, for whom her tantalising mouth pouted into
smiles, thought her nothing short of a goddess, and were moved to
inarticulate rhyme.

* * * * *

Trennahan had met many more women who were beautiful, seductive,
dashing, and withal fastidious, than had these young men of a
cosmopolitan and still chaotic State; nevertheless, he might have been
Adam ranging the dreary solitudes of Paradise, facing about for the
first time upon the first woman. Helena was the type of woman for whom
such men as meet her have the strongest passion of their lives, if for
no other reason than because she induces an exaggeration of their best
faculties and a consequent exaltation of self-appreciation, as
distinguished from mere masculine self-sufficiency. Never is the briefly
favoured one so much of