or ignoring her and putting her in her ordained
inferior feminine place. She glanced down at her skirts with an angry
sense of enforced masquerade. And then she laughed--for she had a keen
sense of humor that always came to her rescue when she was in danger of
taking herself too seriously.

Through the foliage between her and the last of the stretches of
highroad winding up from Remsen City she spied a man climbing in her
direction--a long, slim figure in cap, Norfolk jacket and
knickerbockers. Instantly--and long before he saw her--there was a
grotesque whisking out of sight of the serious personality upon which
we have been intruding. In its stead there stood ready to receive the
young man a woman of the type that possesses physical charm and knows
how to use it--and does not scruple to use it. For a woman to conquer
man by physical charm is far and away the easiest, the most fleeting
and the emptiest of victories. But for woman thus to conquer without
herself yielding anything whatsoever, even so little as an alluring
glance of the eye--that is quite another matter. It was this sort of
conquest that Jane Hastings delighted in--and sought to gain with any
man who came within range. If the men had known what she was about,
they would have denounced her conduct as contemptible and herself as
immoral, even brazen. But in their innocence they accused only their
sophisticated and superbly masculine selves and regarded her as the
soul of innocence. This was the more absurd in them because she
obviously excelled in the feminine art of inviting display of charm.
To glance at her was to realize at once the beauty of her figure, the
exceeding grace of her long back and waist. A keen observer would have
seen the mockery lurking in her light-brown eyes, and about the corners
of her full red lips.

She arranged her thick dark hair to make a secret, half-revealed charm
of her fascinating pink ears and to reveal in dazzling unexpectedness
the soft, round whiteness of the nape of her neck.

Because you are thus let into Miss Hastings' naughty secret, so well
veiled behind an air of earnest and almost cold dignity, you must not
do her the injustice of thinking her unusually artful. Such artfulness
is common enough; it secures husbands by the thousand and by the tens
of thousands. No, only in the skill of artfulness was Miss Hastings
unusual.

As the long strides of the tall, slender man brought him rapidly
nearer, his f