nted generally to the group,
"that the male mind leans inevitably toward violent colours?"

"Perhaps they appeal to the barbaric part of us," suggested Trent,
becoming suddenly at ease amid the battle of inanities.

"Have you a weakness for red, too, Mr. Trent?" enquired Gerty.

The sparkle in his eyes leaped out at her challenge.

"Only in the matter of hair," he retorted boldly.

She regarded him intently for a moment, while he felt again as he had
felt at Laura Wilde's, not only her fascination--her personal
radiance--but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a
heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal.
Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he
wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as
artificial as her brilliant manner. It was magnificent, but, after all,
it was not nature.

"Because I warn you now," she pursued, after the brief pause, "that if
you bind your first play in red I shall refuse to read it."

"You can't escape on that ground," rejoined Trent, "I'll make it green."

"Well, you're more civilised than Perry," declared Gerty, with one of
her relapses into defiant ridicule, which caused Trent to wonder if she
were not acting upon an intuition which taught her that a slight shock
is pleasantly stimulating to the fancy, "and I suppose it's my
association with him that convinces me if we'd leave your sex alone it
would finally revert to the savage state and to skin girdles."

"Now don't you think Perry would look rather nice in skins?" enquired
the handsome woman. "I can quite see him with his club like the man
in--which one of Wagner's?"

"It isn't the club of the savage I object to," coolly protested Gerty,
"it's the taste. Perry has been married to me five years," she
continued, reflectively, "a long enough period you would think to teach
even a Red Indian that my hair positively shrieks at anything remotely
resembling pink. Yet when I went to the Hot Springs last autumn he
actually had this room hung for me in terra-cotta."

Trent cast a blank stare about the tapestried walls.

"But where is it?" he demanded.

"It's gone," was Gerty's brief rejoinder, and she added, after a moment
devoted to her cigarette, "now that's where it pays to have the wisdom
of the serpent. I really flatter myself," she admitted complacently,
"that I've a genius, I did it so beautifully. Your young innocent would
have mangle