better taste she would be almost charming. She embodies
youth properly equipped."

"For reproduction, you mean. That is the reason that the silliest, the
meanest, the most poisonous girl can always find a husband if she is
healthy. It is no wonder that some of us want a new standard."

Gwynne laughed. "Schopenhauer suits you better when you are out on the
marsh in rubber boots and a shooting-jacket. Do you realize that if you
persist in this determination to camp permanently in the outer--and
frigid--zone, you will never be the centre of a life drama? That, I take
it, is what every woman desires most. You had a sort of
curtain-raiser--to my mind, hardly that. First love is merely the more
picturesque successor of measles and whooping-cough. In marriage it may
develop into something worth while, but in itself amounts to
nothing--except as material for poets. But the real drama--that is in
the permanent relation. This relation is the motive power of the great
known dramas of the world. Life is packed with little unheard of dramas
of precisely the same sort--the eternal duet of sex; nothing else keeps
it going. Now, it is positive that a woman cannot have a drama all by
herself--"

"Not a drama in the old style. But that is what we are trying to avoid.
Are there not other faculties? What has civilization done for the world
if it is to be everlastingly sex-ridden? What is the meaning of this
multitude of faculties that progress has developed? What is the meaning
of life itself--"

"Oh, are you aiming to read the riddle of life?"

"I mean to pass my own life in the effort. Men have failed. It is our
turn. But if I say any more I suppose you will pinch me again."

"No," said Gwynne, smiling. "I feel much more like kissing you--ah!"

He had the satisfaction of seeing her eyes blaze. His pipe was finished;
he clasped his hands behind his head and almost lay down in his deep
chair. "I am just tired enough to be completely happy, and if I can
look at you I am willing to listen like a lamb all night."

"And be convinced of nothing." Isabel tossed her head and returned to
her chair. It faced him and he could still look at her. They watched
each other from opposite sides of the hearth with something of the
unblinking wariness of a dog and a cat, and no doubt had they possessed
caudal appendages they would have lashed them slowly.

"I don't say that," he replied, in a moment. "I believe I intimated that
I came here to-night