ed on myself for years and I
can go on. When you came today I wasn't myself. I was disappointed and
miserable and my misery made its appeal to your sympathy. You were
carried away because you're emotional, and it was all my fault. I'm
supposed to be practical and I let you do it. We must forget about it
now, that's all."

"Some things--" his voice mounted to a thrill of feeling--"can't be
forgotten."

"They must be."

"I have made you angry," he said with deep contrition, "and it's the
last thing in the world I wanted to do."

Marcia smiled again, as she might have smiled on a child who promises to
be good all its life, and who will in a forgetful half-hour be again
breaking all the laws and ordinances of the nursery.

"No, I'm not angry," she said thoughtfully. "One should not be angry
with a person of your exact sort, Paul. In another man the same thing
would have made me angry, but not in you. I am only sorry it happened.
Let's pretend it didn't."

"Why," he inquired, puzzled, as he gazed at the face still moist with
its recent tears and now rather cryptic in its expression, "are your
laws of judgment different for me than for other men?"

Marcia shook her head.

"Perhaps just because you are yourself different from other men. Maybe
in the artist there is something of the woman and something of the
child, as well as something of the man. One doesn't grow angry with a
child."

"Oh!" The monosyllable came with an undernote of chagrin. "I'm not
exactly responsible. That's what you mean?"

She did not answer in words, but her eyes as she looked off through the
drizzle with her fingers hanging limply motionless at her sides gave him
the affirmative reply, and he went on in a low voice.

"Of course, that would make you hate me. It must make anyone hate me if
it's true."

There was a moment's silence and he heard her laugh. It was a sound of a
single note and it was neither a laugh of amusement nor of ridicule. If
there was any betrayal of laughing at the expense of someone, the
someone was evidently herself, and Paul was not sure it was a laugh
after all. Possibly it was a single sob or half-sob and half-laugh. But
she went on in a voice flattened by weariness.

"Life deals in paradoxes. Possibly that very thing might make one love
you."

Paul stood in the small room, feeling himself very small and
contemptible. The face of Loraine rose before his memory, beautiful and
petulant, appealing and regal, fea