y world. Now I shouldn't be at home in
an imaginary world. I'm not good enough for that, and don't want to be.
Your wife is very good, but she lives for herself, for her own virtues
and the peace and happiness she gets out of them."

"She lived for Robin," he interrupted.

"Robin was a part of herself," Mrs. Clarke said dryly. "Women like that
don't know how to love as lovers, because they care for the virtues in
men rather than for the men themselves. They are robed in ideals, and
they are in mortal fear of a speck of dust falling on the robe. The dust
of my scandal was upon me, so your wife avoided me. That I was innocent
didn't matter. I had been mixed up with something ugly. Your chivalry
was instinctively on the side of justice. Her virtue inclined to the
other side. Her virtue is destructive."

He was silent.

"Now it has driven you out like a scapegoat into the wilderness!"

"No, no!" he muttered, without conviction.

"But don't let it destroy you. I would rather deliberately destroy
myself than let any one destroy me. In the one case there's strength of
a kind, in the other there's no strength at all. I speak very plainly,
but I'm not a woman full of ideals. I accept the world just as it is,
men just as they are. If a speck of dust alights on me, I don't think
myself hopelessly befouled; and if some one I loved made a slip, I
should only think that it is human to err and that it's humanity I
love."

"Humanity!" he repeated, looking down. "Ah!" He sighed deeply.

He raised his head.

"And if some one you loved killed your Jimmy?"

"As you----?"

"Yes--yes?"

"I should love him all the more because of the misery added to him," she
said firmly. "There's only one thing a really great love can't forgive."

"What is it?"

"The deliberate desire and intention to hurt it and degrade it."

"I never had that."

"No."

"Then--then you think she never loved me at all?"

But Mrs. Clarke did not answer that question.

The daylight was rapidly failing. She seemed almost to be fading away in
the dimness and in the noises of evening which rose from the Grande Rue.
Yet something of her remained and was very definite, so definite that
even Dion, broken on the wheel and indifferent to casual influences
as few men are ever indifferent, felt it almost powerfully--the
concentration of her will, the unyielding determination of her mind,
active and intense behind the pale mask of her physical body.

He turned