those things but an
attraction?"

I saw how he had them, whatever they were, before him as he slowly shook
his head. "They're not an attraction. They're too queer."

I caught in an instant my way to fall in with him; and not the less that
I by this time felt myself committed, up to the intellectual eyes, to
ascertaining just _how_ queer the person under discussion might be. "Oh,
of course I'm not speaking of her as a party to a silly flirtation, or
an object of any sort of trivial pursuit. But there are so many
different ways of being taken."

"For a fellow like you. But not for a fellow like me. For me there's
only one."

"To be, you mean, in love?"

He put it a little differently. "Well, to be thoroughly pleased."

"Ah, that's doubtless the best way and the firm ground. And you mean
you're _not_ thoroughly pleased with Mrs. Server?"

"No--and yet I want to be kind to her. Therefore what's the matter?"

"Oh, if it's what's the matter with _you_ you ask me, that extends the
question. If you want to be kind to her, you get on with her, as we were
saying, quite enough for my argument. And isn't the matter also, after
all," I demanded, "that you simply feel she desires you to be kind?"

"She does that." And he looked at me as with the sense of drawing from
me, for his relief, some greater help than I was as yet conscious of the
courage to offer. "It _is_ that she desires me. She likes it. And the
extraordinary thing is that _I_ like it."

"And why in the world shouldn't you?"

"Because she terrifies me. She has something to hide."

"But, my dear man," I asked with a gaiety singularly out of relation to
the small secret thrill produced in me by these words--"my dear man,
what woman who's worth anything hasn't?"

"Yes, but there are different ways. What _she_ tries for is this false
appearance of happiness."

I weighed it. "But isn't that the best thing?"

"It's terrible to have to keep it up."

"Ah, but if you don't _for_ her? If it all comes on herself?"

"It doesn't," Guy Brissenden presently said. "I do--'for' her--help to
keep it up." And then, still unexpectedly to me, came out the rest of
his confession. "I want to--I try to; that's what I mean by being kind
to her, and by the gratitude with which she takes it. One feels that one
doesn't want her to break down."

It was on this--from the poignant touch in it--that I at last felt I had
burnt my ships and didn't care how much I showed I was with hi