ured,
him. She thought of Richard Calmady, self-imprisoned in the luxurious
villa, and of the possibilities of her, so far platonic, relation to
him. She glanced down at her own rustling skirts and daintily-shod feet
traveling over the hot stones, then at the noisy gamblers, then at the
women washing, with that consummate disregard of sanitation, food and
raiment together in the rusty iron trough by the fountain. The violent
contrasts, the violent lights and shadows, the violent diversities of
purpose and emotion, of rank, of health, of fortune and misfortune,
went to her head. Whatever the risks or dangers that excitement
remained inexhaustible. Nay, those very dangers and risks ministered to
its perpetual upflowing. It struck her she had been over-scrupulous,
weakly conscientious, in making confession and seeking absolution. Such
timid moralities do not really shape destiny, control or determine
human fate. The shouting, fighting youths there, with their filthy pack
of cards and few _centissimi_, sprawling in the unstinted sunshine,
were nearer the essential truth. They were the profound, because the
practical philosophers! Therefore let us gamble, gamble, gamble, be the
stake small or great, as long as the merest flicker of life, or
fraction of uttermost farthing, is left! And so, when Destournelle took
up his lament again, she listened to him, for the moment, with
remarkable lightness of heart.

"I appeal to you in the name of my as yet unwritten poems, my
masterpieces for which France, for which the whole brotherhood of
letters, so anxiously waits, to put a term to this appalling
chastisement!"

"Delicious!" said Helen, under her breath.

"Your classicism is the natural complement of my mediaevalism. The
elasticity, the concreteness, of your temperament fertilised the
too-brooding introspectiveness of my own. It lightened the reverence
which I experience in the contemplation of my own nature. It induced in
me the hint of frivolity which is necessary to procure action. Our
union was as that of high-noon and impenetrable night. I anticipated
extraordinary consequences."

"Marriage of a butterfly and a bat? Yes, the progeny should be
surprising, little animals certainly," commented Madame de Vallorbes.

"In deserting me you have rendered me impotent. That is a crime. It is
an atrocity. You assassinate my genius."

"Then, indeed, I have reason to congratulate myself on my ingenuity,"
she returned, "since I succ