an understanding with a certain young man with whom she
fancied herself in love. They were spending a Saturday to Monday at a
great place on Long Island. On Sunday night, her host, a man old enough
to be her father, invited her to see his rose garden by moonlight. She
accepted this invitation as a matter of course. Pacing down a path
between tall privet hedges, her host, who for some minutes seemed to
have lost the use of his tongue, made her a sudden impassioned
declaration of love, seized her in his arms, and kissed her wherever he
could with a kind of dreadful fury. For half a minute she stood still as
a statue. Then, crimson with shame and anger, she wrenched free, and
struck him heavy blows on the face and head with her strong young fists.
She beat him, not indeed to insensibility, but to his senses. They
returned to the house after a time, and entered the drawing-room talking
in lazy, natural voices and praising the beauty of the night and of the
garden. Not even Barbara's lover suspected that anything out of the
common had happened.

Barbara, having played half a dozen rubbers of bridge with the great
skill and sweet temper which were natural to her, excused herself, went
to her room, and cried half the night. It was not the shame of having
been forcibly kissed that sickened her of herself, but the
unforgettable, unforgivable fact that toward the last of that furious
kissing she had found a certain low feline pleasure in the kisses. She
wished that she might die, or, infinitely better, that she had never
been born.

It seemed terrible to her that she could at once be in love with one man
and enjoy the kisses of another. She had heard of girls who were thus,
and had for them the contempt which they deserved. And yet it seemed
that she was one of them; neither better nor worse. What Barbara did not
realize was, that in the first place she was not really in love with
anybody and never had been, and that it was not she herself who enjoyed
being kissed by a man to whom she was indifferent, neither liking nor
loathing, but nature, which for reasons, or perhaps only whims, of its
own, tempts the cell to divide and the flower to go to seed.

Through the tangle of her love affairs Wilmot Allen threaded a path of
hope, despair, and cynicism. There were times when she seemed to have a
return of her childhood infatuation for him; there were times when he
feared that in one of her moments of impressionable enthusiasm she wo