of her eight-and-twenty years, telling
herself that her youth and the glory of it had departed. She wore black
dresses, rolled bandages, pulled lint. Selecting Mary Magdalene as her
special intercessor, she made a careful study of the life and legends
of that saint. This proved stimulating to her imagination. She
proceeded to write a little one-act drama concerning the holy woman's
dealings, subsequent to her conversion, quite late in life in fact,
with such as survived of her former lovers. The dialogue was very
moving in parts. Helen read it aloud one bleak January evening, by the
light of a single candle, to her friend M. Paul Destournelle, poet and
novelist--with whom, just then, by her own desire, her relations were
severely platonic--and they both wept. The application, though
delicate, was obvious. And those tears appeared to lay the dust of so
many pleasant sins, and promise fertilisation of so heavy a crop of
virtue, that--by inevitable action of the law of contraries--the two
friends found it more than ever difficult to say farewell and part that
night.

Now looking back on all that, viewing it calmly in perspective, her
action and attitude struck Helen as somewhat imbecile. Prayer and
penitence have too often a tendency to kick the beam when fear ceases
to weight the balance. And so it followed that the lust of the flesh,
the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, presented themselves to her
as powers by no means contemptible, or unworthy of invocation, this
morning, while she sat at the luxuriously furnished breakfast-table
beneath the glistering dome of the airy pavilion and gazed out between
its slender columns, over the curving lines of the painted city and
glittering waters of the bay, to the cone of Vesuvius rising, in
imperial purple, against the azure sky. To-day, sign, as she noted, of
fine weather, omen, as she trusted, of good fortune, the smoke of its
everlasting burnings towered up and up into the translucent atmosphere,
and then drifted away--a gigantic, wedge-shaped pennon--towards Capri
and the open sea. And, beholding these things, out of simple, physical
well-being, fulness of bread, conviction of her own undiminished
beauty, and the merry devilry begotten of these, she fell to projecting
a second, a companion, one-act drama founded upon the life of the
Magdalene, but, this time, before the saint's conversion, at an
altogether earlier stage of her very instructive history. And this
drama s