ctly as reasonable," he contended, "as to read through on the
same day every poem in a great anthology. Who could have anything but
nausea for poetry after such a gorge? And they _must_ hate pictures or
else be literally blind to them, the people who look at five hundred
in a morning! If I had looked at every picture in the Long Gallery
in one walk through it, I should thrust my cane through the Titian
Francis-First itself when I came to the Salon Carre."

So he took them to see only a few, five or six, carefully selected
things--there was one wonderful day when he showed them nothing
but the Da Vinci Saint Anne, and the Venus of Melos, comparing the
dissimilar beauty of those two divine faces so vitally, that Sylvia
for days afterwards, when she closed her eyes and saw them, felt that
she looked on two living women. She told them this and, "Which one do
you see most?" he asked her. "Oh, the Saint Anne," she told him.

He seemed dissatisfied. But she did not venture to ask him why. They
lived in an atmosphere where omissions were vital.

Sylvia often wondered in those days if there ever had been a situation
so precariously balanced which continued to hang poised and stable,
minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day. There were
moments when her head was swimming with moral dizziness. She wondered
if such moments ever came to the two quiet, self-controlled men who
came and went, with cordial, easy friendliness, in and out of the
appartement on the Rue de Presbourg. They gave no sign of it, they
gave no sign of anything beyond the most achieved appearance of a
natural desire to be obliging and indulgent to the niece of an old
friend. This appearance was kept up with such unflagging perseverance
that it almost seemed consciously concerted between them. They so
elaborately avoided the slightest appearance of rivalry that their
good taste, like a cloth thrown over an unknown object, inevitably
excited curiosity as to what was concealed beneath it.

And Sylvia was not to be outdone. She turned her own eyes away from
it as sedulously as they. She never let a conscious thought dwell on
it--and like all other repressed and strangled currents of thought, it
grew swollen and restive, filling her subconsciousness with monstrous,
unformulated speculations. She was extremely absorbed in the luxury,
the amenity, the smooth-working perfection of the life about her.
She consciously concentrated all her faculties on her prodi