nasty--or scornful. I've always worn my gowns more
than twice--some of them a great many times, except when I detested
them. And anyhow, the premature death of a gown is very, very good for
trade. That influences many ladies, of course."

He burst out laughing, but there was a satirical note in the gaiety, or
something still harsher.

"'We deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us,'" he answered. "It's
all such a hollow make-believe."

"What is?"

She gazed at him inquiringly, for this mood was new to her. She was
vaguely conscious of some sort of change in him--not exactly toward
her, but a change, nevertheless.

"The life we rich people lead is a hollow make-believe, Jasmine," he
said, with sudden earnestness. "I don't know what's the matter, but
we're not getting out of life all we ought to get; and we're not
putting into it all we ought to put in. There's a sense of
emptiness--of famine somewhere."

He caught the reflection of his face in the glass again, and his brow
contracted. "We get sordid and sodden, and we lose the proportions of
life. I wanted Dick Wilberforce to do something with me the other day,
and he declined. 'Why, my dear fellow,' I said, 'you know you want to
do it?' 'Of course I do,' he answered, 'but I can't afford that kind of
thing, and you know it.' Well, I did know it, but I had forgotten. I
was only thinking of what I myself could afford to do. I was setting up
my own financial standard, and was forgetting the other fellows who
hadn't my standard. What's the result? We drift apart, Wilberforce and
I--well, I mean Wilberforce as a type. We drift into sets of people who
can afford to do certain things, and we leave such a lot of people
behind that we ought to have clung to, and that we would have clung to,
if we hadn't been so much thinking of ourselves, or been so soddenly
selfish."

A rippling laugh rang through the room. "Boanerges--oh, Boanerges Byng!
'Owever can you be so heloquent!"

Jasmine put both hands on his shoulders and looked up at him with that
look which had fascinated him--and so many others--in their day. The
perfume which had intoxicated him in the first days of his love of her,
and steeped his senses in the sap of youth and Eden, smote them again,
here on the verge of the desert before him. He suddenly caught her in
his arms and pressed her to him almost roughly.

"You exquisite siren--you siren of all time," he said, with a note of
joy in which there was, too