arlier, with Ruth Gaynor, from
the list of his visits to Mrs. Vervain: the special conditions attending
it had made it no more like a visit to Mrs. Vervain than an engraved
dinner invitation is like a personal letter. Yet it was to talk over
his call with Miss Gaynor that he was now returning to the scene of that
episode; and it was because Mrs. Vervain could be trusted to handle the
talking over as skilfully as the interview itself that, at her corner,
he had felt the dilettante's irresistible craving to take a last look at
a work of art that was passing out of his possession.

On the whole, he knew no one better fitted to deal with the unexpected
than Mrs. Vervain. She excelled in the rare art of taking things for
granted, and Thursdale felt a pardonable pride in the thought that she
owed her excellence to his training. Early in his career Thursdale had
made the mistake, at the outset of his acquaintance with a lady, of
telling her that he loved her and exacting the same avowal in return.
The latter part of that episode had been like the long walk back from a
picnic, when one has to carry all the crockery one has finished using:
it was the last time Thursdale ever allowed himself to be encumbered
with the debris of a feast. He thus incidentally learned that the
privilege of loving her is one of the least favors that a charming woman
can accord; and in seeking to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment he had
developed a science of evasion in which the woman of the moment became
a mere implement of the game. He owed a great deal of delicate enjoyment
to the cultivation of this art. The perils from which it had been his
refuge became naively harmless: was it possible that he who now took his
easy way along the levels had once preferred to gasp on the raw heights
of emotion? Youth is a high-colored season; but he had the satisfaction
of feeling that he had entered earlier than most into that chiar'oscuro
of sensation where every half-tone has its value.

As a promoter of this pleasure no one he had known was comparable
to Mrs. Vervain. He had taught a good many women not to betray their
feelings, but he had never before had such fine material to work in. She
had been surprisingly crude when he first knew her; capable of making
the most awkward inferences, of plunging through thin ice, of recklessly
undressing her emotions; but she had acquired, under the discipline
of his reticences and evasions, a skill almost equal to his own,