be the effect of tight lacing; perhaps she has to keep turning
and twisting that way to get breath. But attribute the worst motive: say
it is to make people look at her! Well, Burnamy has a right to look with
the rest; and I am not going to renounce him because he takes refuge
with one pretty girl from another. It's what men have been doing from
the beginning of time."

"Oh, I dare say!"

"Men," he went on, "are very delicately constituted; very peculiarly.
They have been known to seek the society of girls in general, of any
girl, because some girl has made them happy; and when some girl has made
them unhappy, they are still more susceptible. Burnamy may be merely
amusing himself, or he may be consoling himself; but in either case I
think the pivotal girl has as much right to him as Miss Triscoe. She had
him first; and I'm all for her."

LXI.

Burnamy came away from seeing the pivotal girl and her mother off on the
train which they were taking that evening for Frankfort and Hombourg,
and strolled back through the Weimar streets little at ease with
himself. While he was with the girl and near her he had felt the
attraction by which youth impersonally draws youth, the charm which mere
maid has for mere man; but once beyond the range of this he felt sick at
heart and ashamed. He was aware of having used her folly as an anodyne
for the pain which was always gnawing at him, and he had managed to
forget it in her folly, but now it came back, and the sense that he had
been reckless of her rights came with it. He had done his best to make
her think him in love with her, by everything but words; he wondered how
he could be such an ass, such a wicked ass, as to try making her promise
to write to him from Frankfort; he wished never to see her again, and he
wished still less to hear from her. It was some comfort to reflect that
she had not promised, but it was not comfort enough to restore him to
such fragmentary self-respect as he had been enjoying since he parted
with Agatha Triscoe in Carlsbad; he could not even get back to the
resentment with which he had been staying himself somewhat before the
pivotal girl unexpectedly appeared with her mother in Weimar.

It was Sedan Day, but there was apparently no official observance of the
holiday, perhaps because the Grand-Duke was away at the manoeuvres,
with all the other German princes. Burnamy had hoped for some voluntary
excitement among the people, at least enough to wa