e bitterly--"Only a primitive woman will care for
these!"

The priest laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.

"Come, come! Do not be cynical, my son! I think with you that if
anything can find an entrance to a woman's soul it is love--but the
woman must be capable of loving. That is the difficulty with the little
millionairess Royal. She is not capable!"

He uttered the last words slowly and with emphasis.

Rivardi gave him a quick searching glance.

"You seem to know that as a certainty"--he said, "How and why do you
know it?"

Aloysius raised his eyes and looked straight ahead of him with a
curious, far-off, yet searching intensity.

"I cannot tell you how or why"--he answered--"You would not believe me
if I told you that sometimes in this wonderful world of ours, beings
are born who are neither man nor woman, and who partake of a nature
that is not so much human as elemental and ethereal--or might one not
almost say, atmospheric? That is, though generated of flesh and blood,
they are not altogether flesh and blood, but possess other untested and
unproved essences mingled in their composition, of which as yet we can
form no idea. We grope in utter ignorance of the greatest of
mysteries--Life!--and with all our modern advancement, we are utterly
unable to measure or to account for life's many and various
manifestations. In the very early days of imaginative prophecy, the
'elemental' nature of certain beings was accepted by men accounted wise
in their own time,--in the long ago discredited assertions of the Count
de Gabalis and others of his mystic cult,--and I am not entirely sure
that there does not exist some ground for their beliefs. Life is
many-sided;--humanity can only be one facet of the diamond."

Giulio Rivardi had listened with surprised attention.

"You seem to imply then"--he said--"that this rich woman, Morgana
Royal, is hardly a woman at all?--a kind of sexless creature incapable
of love?"

"Incapable of the usual kind of so-called 'love'--yes!" answered
Aloysius--"But of love in other forms I can say nothing, for I know
nothing!--she may be capable of a passion deep and mysterious as life
itself. But come!--we might talk all night and arrive no closer to the
solving of this little feminine problem! You are fortunate in your
vocation of artist and designer, to have been chosen by her to carry
out her conceptions of structural and picturesque beauty--let the
romance stay there!--and do not try to