d, as he suggested, they had begun to know each other
afresh. Alma liked to remember how severely she had treated him at that
first encounter; perhaps that was enough for dignity. Mr. Redgrave
would hardly forget himself again. For the rest, she could not pretend,
within herself, to dislike him; and if he paid homage to her beauty, to
her social charm, to her musical gifts (all of which things Alma
recognised and tabulated), it might be only just to let him make amends
for something known to both of them. The insult Alma was far from
forgiving. But when she had talked twice with Redgrave distantly, as a
stranger to all his affairs--it began to steal upon her mind that there
would be a sweetly subtle satisfaction in allowing the man to imagine
that her coldness was not quite what it seemed; that so, perchance, he
might be drawn on and become enslaved. She had never been able to
congratulate herself on a conquest of Cyrus Redgrave. The memory of
Bregenz could still, at moments, bring the blood to her face; for it
was a memory of cool, calculating outrage, not of passion that had
broken bounds. To subdue the man in good earnest would be another
thing, and a peculiarly delicious morsel of revenge. Was it possible?
Not long ago she would have scoffed at the thought, deeming Redgrave
incapable of love in any shape. But her mind was changing in an
atmosphere of pleasure and flattery, and under the influence of talk
such as she heard in this house and one or two others like it.

To her husband, she represented Mrs. Strangeways as a very pleasant
woman with a passion for all the arts; formerly wife of a painter, and
now married to a wealthy man who shared her tastes. This satisfied
Harvey; but Alma had not deceived herself, and could not be quite
comfortable with Mrs. Strangeways. She no longer puzzled over the flow
of guests to the house in Porchester Terrace, having discovered not
only that most of these were people, as Sibyl said, of no account, who
had few houses open to them, but that several would not be admitted to
any circle of scrupulous respectability. The fact was that Mrs.
Strangeways largely entertained the _demi-monde_, to use in its true
sense a term persistently misapplied. Not impossibly she thought the
daughter of Bennet Frothingham might, from one point of view, be
included among such persons; on the other hand, her warmth proved that
she regarded Mrs. Rolfe as a social acquisition, if indeed she was not
genui