nerves of steel?"

She leaned forward in the brougham.

"If your muscles are of iron."

"My muscles!" he said.

"Haven't you educated them?"

"Oh--yes."

"And perhaps I've educated my nerves."

Mrs. Chetwinde's spirited horses began to prance and show temper. Mrs.
Clarke sat back. As the carriage moved away, Dion saw Mrs. Chetwinde's
eyes fixed upon him. They looked at that moment not at all vague. If
they had not been her eyes, he would have been inclined to think them
piercing. But, of course, Mrs. Chetwinde's eyes could never be that.

"How does one educate one's nerves, Guy?" asked Dion, as the two friends
walked away.

"By being defendant in a long series of divorce cases, I should say."

"Has Mrs. Clarke ever been in another case of this kind?"

"Good heavens, no. If she had, even I couldn't believe in her innocence,
as I do now."

"Then where did she get her education?"

"Where do women get things, old Dion? It seems to me sometimes straight
from God, and sometimes straight from the devil."

Dion's mental comment on this was, "What about Mrs. Clarke?" But he did
not utter it.

Before he left Daventry, he was pledged to be in court on the last day
of the case, when the verdict would be given. He wished to go to the
court again on the morrow, but the thought of Rosamund decided him not
to do this; he would, he knew, feel almost ashamed in telling her that
the divorce court, at this moment, fascinated him, that he longed,
or almost longed, to follow the colored fires of a certain torch down
further shadowy alleys of the unwise life. He felt quite sure that
Mrs. Clarke was an innocent woman, but she had certainly been very
unconventional indeed in her conduct. He remembered the almost stern
strength in her husky voice when she had said "my unconventionality,
_which I shall never give up_." So even this hideous and widely
proclaimed scandal would not induce her to bow in the future before the
conventional gods. She really was an extraordinary woman. What would
Rosamund think of her? If she won her case she evidently meant to know
Rosamund. Of course, there could be nothing against that. If she
lost the case, naturally there could never be any question of such an
acquaintance; he knew instinctively that she would never suggest it.
Whatever she was, or was not, she was certainly a woman of the world.

That evening, when he reached home, he found Rosamund sitting in the
nursery in the company of Rob