ins who hankered for blond women....

"God! I can't understand."

She came toward him frankly....

"_Amigo mio_, have you a right to understand?"

"I'm sorry."

"No, but--see! You and I have often met. I mean: there is a plane of us,
who must be loyal to one another. You understand. And to you, to one of
us, I don't want to lie. Only certain persons have a right to ask. A
father, a mother, a child, a sister or brother or husband. But our
destinies touch only, hardly even that. Will never grip, bind. There is
no right you have, beyond what--you buy; and there are things--I don't
sell."

"I'm sorry," Shane turned aside. "I was just carried away. But I should
go."

"Do you want to go?"

"No."

"Then stay. Others stay."

"But--"

"Are you better than the others? Think."

"No," he thought. "Of course not. Worse perhaps. I know better."

"You are nearly as honest as I am," she laughed. She put her hand out in
a great frank gesture.

"If I can smile, surely you can." Her fingers beckoned. "Come, don't be
silly."

He caught her hands and laughed with her. He had been acting like a boy
in his twenties, and he a man of forty-two....

Section 6

He had thought somehow that in this affair of Hedda he would find--oh,
something: that once more the moon would take on its rippling smile and
the sun its sweet low laughter, and the winds be no longer a matter of
physics, but strong entities. Quickly, unconsciously, the thought had
come to him.... With the wife of his young days had come the magic of
romance, and with Claire-Anne of Marseilles had come a sublime storm of
passion, and with the Arab lady had come the scheme of an ordered life,
good composition and rich color.... They had lasted but little and gone
as a rainbow goes.... With Hedda there was nothing.... It was just
abominably wrong....

Here he was, young--for his forty-two he was young,--supple, successful
in his way, rich if you wanted to put it in that word. And no heart for
life; listless. It was wrong.... All he could think of doing was to be
intimate with an easy woman. No zest for her great noble frame, her
surge of flaxen hair. The veneer of conventional good manners,
conventional good taste, only made the actuality of it more appalling
... she with the gifts of life and grace, he with his, and all they
could do was be physically intimate.... And she took money with a little
smile, contemptuous of herself, contemptuous of him.... They both