when she raised her eyes they were dry and clear.

"I can see it better," Hilda went on, with immense audacity, "much
better."

"Isn't it safer to feel?"

"Jamais de la vie! The nerves lie always."

They were on the edge of the vortex of the old dispute. Alicia leaned
back among the cushions and regarded the other with an undecided eye.

"You are not sure," said Hilda, "that you won't ask me, at this point,
to look at the pictures in that old copy of the Persian classic--I
forget its lovely name--or inquire what sort of house we had last night.
Well, don't be afraid of hurting my feelings. Only, you know, between us
as between more doubtful people, the door must be either open or shut. I
fancy you take cold easily; perhaps you had better shut the door."

"Not for worlds," Alicia said, with promptitude. Then she added, rather
cleverly, "That would be spoiling my one view of life."

Hilda smiled. "Isn't there any life where you live?" She glanced round
her, at the tapestried elegance of the room, with sudden indifference.
"After all," she said, "I don't know what I am doing here, in your
affairs. As the world swings no one could be more remote from them or
you. I belong to its winds and its highways--how have you brought me
here, a tramp-actress, to your drawing-room?"

Alicia laid a detaining hand upon Miss Howe's skirt. "Don't go away,"
she said. Hilda sat at the other end of the sofa; there was hardly a
foot between them. She went on with a curious excitement.

"My kind of life is so primitive, so simple; it is one pure impulse, you
don't know. One only asks the things that minister--one goes and finds
and takes them; one's feet in the straw, one's head under any roof. What
difference does it make? The only thing that counts, that rules, is the
chance of seeing something else, feeling something more, doing something
better."

Alicia only looked at her and tightened the grasp of her fingers on the
actress's skirt. Hilda made the slightest, most involuntary movement.
It comprehended the shaking off of hindrance, the action of flight. Then
she glanced about her again with a kind of appraisement, which ended
with Alicia and embraced her. What she realised seemed to urge her,
I think, in some weak place of her sex, to go on intensely, almost
fiercely.

"Everything here is aftermath. You are a gleaner, Alicia Livingstone. We
leave it all over the world for people of taste, like you, in the glow
of their illusio