fascinated. She thought
him the most beautiful of all the men she knew. It was not his face, not
his appearance generally, but his eyes. Oh, the loss of such eyes! she
thought--yes, they are what makes him a finer man than Lawrence. Why
hasn't Lawrence such eyes?

"Believe me, friend," Philip was speaking again, "if I could erase from
my knowledge the weakness of man, I would not need to trail my feet
through these snow-buried forests to find an hour's rest from life."

Claire saw his fingers move nervously on the arms of his chair, and
thought: "That is it, then; I was right; he has his tragedy." She looked
at him again, and as she met his eyes she felt that she was sorrier for
him than she had ever been for Lawrence. Yes, she was sorrier for this
man whose soul burned out of his eyes than for that other whose soul was
always curtained by the expressionless mask that hid him.

"I can't quite agree with you," Lawrence was saying; "I, too, know the
weakness of man, but there is, nevertheless, the glory of sublime beauty
which alone stands, immortal. I should indeed mourn for man if he were
unable to be truly immortal even in his created work. That, it seems to
me, saves him."

"Or loses him," Philip added. "One golden life of unbroken sunshine,
dead at last and laid away in the memory of friends is worth more than
your greatest poem."

"I should call that sentimentality," Lawrence laughed.

"So it is," Philip flashed, "and why not? Must we kill sentiment and go
about with hearts of ice because our world is hard?"

"Is there no way to keep ourselves warm without poultices?" retorted
Lawrence.

Claire sat down at the table. "Come on and enjoy your venison, you two,
and have done with the ills of the universe."

The two men joined her. It was a strange trio: Claire, a dashing boy in
Philip's made-over corduroys; Lawrence wearing his host's summer serge
as though it were his own, and Philip looking at them, amusedly.

"I never quite recover from the charm of you in male attire," Ortez
remarked, looking into her face.

"I've tried at times since our fortunate misfortune to imagine her in
evening gowns and furs," said Lawrence; "but I always fail and end by
getting her into some sort of barbaric costume belonging to the distant
past."

"You are both flattering and both foolish," she told them. "It's my
business to look well in clothes, you know, and it's masculine to admit
my efficiency in a particularly feminin