quaintances, and the thousand small insincerities he heard
around him every day. The very enthusiasm with which she spoke, the
intensity in her face, the decision in her voice, impressed him in a
manner for which he was utterly unprepared. In the world in which he
moved an enthusiasm which was not at the same time an affectation would
have appeared awkwardly out of place. Women whom he knew were
vivaciously excited over their winnings or losses at bridge whist, but
he could not recall that he had ever seen a single one of them stirred
to utterance by any impersonal question of injustice. To be sure there
were charitable ones among them, he supposed, but he had always tended
by a kind of natural selection toward the conspicuously fair, and the
conspicuously fair had proved invariably to be the secretly selfish as
well. His social life appeared to him now, as he walked by Laura's side,
to have been devoid of sincerity as of intelligence, and he recalled
with disgust the exquisite empty voice of Madame Alta, her lyric
sensuality, and the grossness of her affairs with her many lovers. Was
it the after taste of bitterness in his "wine and honey" which caused it
to turn suddenly nauseous in his remembrance?

"And so women can really like one another without jealousy?" he
questioned, laughing.

"What is there to be jealous of?" she retorted quickly. "For after all
one is one's self, you know, and not another. Gerty is beautiful and I
am not, but her loveliness is as keen a delight to me as it is to
her--keener, I think, for she is sometimes bored with it and I never am.
And she is more than this, too, for she is as devoted--as loyal as she
is lovely."

"To you--yes," he answered slowly, for he was thinking of the Gerty whom
he had known--of her audacious cynicism, her startling frankness, her
suggestive coquetry. Was it possible that this creature of red and white
flesh, of sweetness and irony, was really a multiple personality--the
possessor of divers souls? Had he seen only the surface of her because
it was to the surface alone that he had appealed? Or was it that Laura's
creative instinct had builded an image out of her own ideals which she
had called by Gerty's name? He did not know--he could not even attempt
to answer--but the very confusion of his thoughts strengthened the
emotional interest which Laura had aroused. And as each new and vivid
sensation effaces from the mind every impression that has gone before
it, so