rness, divorcing the personal pang from a social
manifestation of some dramatic value. In offering up her egotism that
way she really only made more subtle sacrifices to it, but one could
hardly expect such a consideration, just then, to give her pause. She
anointed his eyelids, she made him see, and he was relieved to find in
her light comment that she took the typical Mrs. Winstick less seriously
than he had supposed when they drove away from the Livingstones'. It
could not occur to him to correct the impression he had then by the
sound of his own voice uttering sympathy.

"But I know now what a wave feels like dashing against a cliff," she
said. "Fancy my thinking I could impose myself! That is the wave's
reflection."

"It goes back into the sea which is its own; and there," said the
priest, whom nature had somehow cheated by the false promise of high
moralities out of an inheritance of beauty,--"and there, I think, is
depth and change and mystery, with joy in the obedience of the tides and
a full beating upon many shores--"

"Ah, my sea! I hear it calling always, even," she said
half-reflectively, "when I am talking to you. But sometimes I think I
am not a wave at all, only a shell, to be stranded and left, always with
the calling in my ears--" She seemed to have dropped altogether into
reverie, and then looked up suddenly, laughing, because he could not
understand.

"After all," she said practically, "what has that to do with it? One
doesn't blame these people. They are stupid--that's all. They want
the obvious. The leading lady of Mr. Llewellyn Stanhope--without the
smallest diamond--who does song and dance on Saturday nights--what can
you expect! If I had a great name they would be pleased enough to see
me. It is one of the rewards of the fame." She was silent for a moment,
and then she added, "They are very poor."

"Those rewards! I have sometimes thought," Arnold said, "that you were
not devoured by thirst for them."

"When we are together, you and I," she answered simply, "I never am."

He took it at its face value. They had had some delightful
conversations. If her words awakened anything in him it was the
remembrance of these. The solace of her companionship presented itself
to him again, and her statement gave their mutual confidence another
seal; that was all. They sat where they were for half an hour, and
something like antagonism and displeasure towards the secretaries' wives
settled upon them,