pon the sea ever tangled fish more
successfully than we women with our flimsies. You are on the right path.
I have seen men enmeshed by a corset cover no prettier, no daintier,
than these of yours I have seen on the line.

"I have called the washing of fine linen an art. But it is not for
itself alone. The greatest of the arts is the conquering of men. Love
is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.
Listen. In all times and ages have been women, great wise women. They
did not need to be beautiful. Greater then all woman's beauty was their
wisdom. Princes end potentates bowed down before them. Nations battled
over them. Empires crashed because of them. Religions were founded
on them. Aphrodite, Astarte, the worships of the night--listen,
infant-woman, of the great women who conquered worlds of men."

And thereafter Saxon listened, in a maze, to what almost seemed a wild
farrago, save that the strange meaningless phrases were fraught with
dim, mysterious significance. She caught glimmerings of profounds
inexpressible and unthinkable that hinted connotations lawless and
terrible. The woman's speech was a lava rush, scorching and searing;
and Saxon's cheeks, and forehead, and neck burned with a blush that
continuously increased. She trembled with fear, suffered qualms of
nausea, thought sometimes that she would faint, so madly reeled her
brain; yet she could not tear herself away, sad sat on and on, her
sewing forgotten on her lap, staring with inward sight upon a nightmare
vision beyond all imagining. At last, when it seemed she could endure
no more, and while she was wetting her dry lips to cry out in protest,
Mercedes ceased.

"And here endeth the first lesson," she said quite calmly, then laughed
with a laughter that was tantalizing and tormenting. "What is the
matter? You are not shocked?"

"I am frightened," Saxon quavered huskily, with a half-sob of
nervousness. "You frighten me. I am very foolish, and I know so little,
that I had never dreamed... THAT."

Mercedes nodded her head comprehendingly.

"It is indeed to be frightened at," she said. "It is solemn; it is
terrible; it is magnificent!"

CHAPTER IV

Saxon had been clear-eyed all her days, though her field of vision
had been restricted. Clear-eyed, from her childhood days with the
saloonkeeper Cady and Cady's good-natured but unmoral spouse, she
had observed, and, later, generalized much upon sex. She knew the
post-nuptia