cks, and she found him,
as she frankly told him, not half as entertaining as he was at Mrs.
Horn's; but she did her best with him as the only flirtable material
which had yet come to her hand. It would have been her ideal to have the
young men stay till past midnight, and her father come down-stairs in
his stocking-feet and tell them it was time to go. But they made a
visit of decorous brevity, and Kendricks did not come again. She met him
afterward, once, as she was crossing the pavement in Union Square to get
into her coupe, and made the most of him; but it was necessarily very
little, and so he passed out of her life without having left any trace
in her heart, though Mela had a heart that she would have put at the
disposition of almost any young man that wanted it. Kendricks himself,
Manhattan cockney as he was, with scarcely more out look into the
average American nature than if he had been kept a prisoner in New York
society all his days, perceived a property in her which forbade him as
a man of conscience to trifle with her; something earthly good and kind,
if it was simple and vulgar. In revising his impressions of her, it
seemed to him that she would come even to better literary effect if
this were recognized in her; and it made her sacred, in spite of her
willingness to fool and to be fooled, in her merely human quality. After
all, he saw that she wished honestly to love and to be loved, and the
lures she threw out to that end seemed to him pathetic rather than
ridiculous; he could not join Beaton in laughing at her; and he did
not like Beaton's laughing at the other girl, either. It seemed to
Kendricks, with the code of honor which he mostly kept to himself
because he was a little ashamed to find there were so few others like
it, that if Beaton cared nothing for the other girl--and Christine
appeared simply detestable to Kendricks--he had better keep away from
her, and not give her the impression he was in love with her. He rather
fancied that this was the part of a gentleman, and he could not have
penetrated to that aesthetic and moral complexity which formed the
consciousness of a nature like Beaton's and was chiefly a torment to
itself; he could not have conceived of the wayward impulses indulged at
every moment in little things till the straight highway was traversed
and well-nigh lost under their tangle. To do whatever one likes is
finally to do nothing that one likes, even though one continues to do
what