wly on together.

"Louis!"

"Yes?"

She could not say it. Close to the breaking point, she was ready now to
give up to him more than he might care for--the only shred left which
she had shrunk from letting him think was within his reach for the
asking--her name.

Pride, prejudice, had died out in the fierce outbreak of a heart
amazingly out of place in the body of one who bore her name.

Generations of her kinsmen, close and remote, had lived in the close
confines of narrow circles--narrow, bloodless, dull folk, almost all
distantly related--and they had lived and mated among themselves,
coldly defiant of that great law which dooms the over-cultivated and
inbred to folly and extinction.

Somewhere, far back along the race-line, some mongrel ancestor had begun
life with a heart; and, unsuspected, that obsolete organ had now
reappeared in her, irritating, confusing, amazing, and finally
stupefying her with its misunderstood pulsations.

At first, like a wounded creature, consciousness of its presence turned
her restless, almost vicious. Then from cynicism to incredulity she had
passed the bitter way to passion, and the shamed recoil from it; to
recklessness, and the contempt for it, and so through sorrow and
humility to love--if it were love to endure the evil in this man and to
believe in the good which he had never yet revealed to her save in a
half-cynical, half-amused content that matters rest in _statu quo_.

"The trouble with us," mused Malcourt, lazily switching the fragrant
beach-grapes with his riding-crop, "is inbreeding. Yes, that's it. And
we know what it brings to kings and kine alike. Tressilvain is half-mad,
I think. And we are used up and out of date.... The lusty, jewelled
bacchantes who now haunt the inner temple kindle the social flames with
newer names than ours. Few of us count; the lumbering British or Dutch
cattle our race was bred from, even in these brief generations, have
become decadent and barren; we are even passing from a fashion which we
have neither intellect to sustain nor courage to dictate to. It's the
raw West that is to be our Nemesis, I think.... 'Mix corpuscles or you
die!'--that's what I read as I run--I mean, saunter; the Malcourts never
run, except to seed. My, what phosphorescent perversion! One might
almost mistake it for philosophy.... But it's only the brilliancy of
decay, Virginia; and it's about time that the last Malcourt stepped down
and out of the scheme of thin