arry on is evil. We were always sad, he says, without knowing why;
even in the Stone Age. In some miraculous way a divine ideal was
disclosed to us, directly at variance with our appetites. It gave us a
new craving, which we could only satisfy by starving all the other
hungers in us. Happiness lies in ceasing to be and to cause being,
because the thing revealed to us is dearer than any existence our
appetites can ever get for us. I can understand that. It's something one
often feels in art. It is even the subject of the greatest of all operas,
which, because I can never hope to sing it, I love more than all the
others." Kitty pulled herself up. "Perhaps you agree with Tolstoy?" she
added languidly.

"No; I think he's a crank," said McKann, cheerfully.

"What do you mean by a crank?"

"I mean an extremist."

Kitty laughed. "Weighty word! You'll always have a world full of people
who keep to the golden mean. Why bother yourself about me and Tolstoy?"

"I don't, except when you bother me."

"Poor man! It's true this isn't your fault. Still, you did provoke it by
glaring at me. Why did you go to the concert?"

"I was dragged."

"I might have known!" she chuckled, and shook her head. "No, you don't
give me any good reasons. Your morality seems to me the compromise of
cowardice, apologetic and sneaking. When righteousness becomes alive and
burning, you hate it as much as you do beauty. You want a little of each
in your life, perhaps--adulterated, sterilized, with the sting taken out.
It's true enough they are both fearsome things when they get loose in the
world; they don't, often."

McKann hated tall talk. "My views on women," he said slowly, "are
simple."

"Doubtless," Kitty responded dryly, "but are they consistent? Do you
apply them to your stenographers as well as to me? I take it for
granted you have unmarried stenographers. Their position, economically,
is the same as mine."

McKann studied the toe of her shoe. "With a woman, everything comes back
to one thing." His manner was judicial.

She laughed indulgently. "So we are getting down to brass tacks, eh? I
have beaten you in argument, and now you are leading trumps."

She put her hands behind her head and her lips parted in a half-yawn.
"Does everything come back to one thing? I wish I knew! It's more than
likely that, under the same conditions, I should have been very like your
stenographers--if they are good ones. Whatever I was, I would have been a