ave counted a curse to me," he quoted a
little bitterly.

As she walked beside him she felt the contact of the nervous irritation
she had provoked, and she found suddenly that almost in spite of herself
she was rejoicing in the masculine quality of his presence--in his
muscular strength, in the vibrant tones of his voice and in the ardent
vitality with which he moved. But the force of his personality was a
force against which she felt that she would struggle until the end.

"I'm not sure about the curse," she answered, "but Gerty's heroes and
mine are rarely the same, you know."

"Then, I suppose, it's virtue that you are after," he remarked.

She looked gravely up at him before she bowed her head in assent. "I
like virtue," she responded quietly. "Don't you?"

"God knows, I do," he replied without hesitation in the grandiloquent
tone he loved to assume upon occasions. "But do you think," he added
presently, "that a man can acquire virtue unless it has been born in
him?"

"I think it is another name for wisdom," she replied, "and that is often
found late and in hard places."

He looked at her with an attention which had become absorbed, exclusive.
"Do you know, I thought virtue was what women didn't care about in men?"
he said, and his voice was tense with curiosity.

"Perhaps you mistake the conventions for virtue," she rejoined; "men
usually do." Then after a moment she added frankly, "But I know very
little of what women like or don't like. I've never really known but two
besides my aunts--and one of these is Gerty."

"And you are very fond of Gerty?" he enquired.

As she looked up at him it seemed to him that her smile was a miracle of
light. "I love her more than anyone in the whole world," she said.

Again she perplexed him, and with each fresh perplexity he was conscious
of an increasing desire to understand. "But I thought all women hated
one another," he observed.

"That's because men have ruled the world in two ways," she returned, and
her protest was not without a smothered indignation; "they have made the
laws and they have made the jokes."

Her championship of her sex amused even while it attracted him--he saw
in it a kind of abstract honour which he had always believed to be
lacking in the feminine mind--and at the same instant he remembered the
rancorous jealousy which had controlled Madame Alta's relations with
other women, the petty stings he had seen dealt at Gerty by her less
lovely ac