rove up to the station and saw a very attractive and
perplexed young man looking anxiously about for somebody to take him to
Shotover. Ahem! the notorious Mr. Siward! Dear, ... I didn't mean to
hurt you! You know it, silly! Mayn't I have my little joke about your
badness--your redoubtable badness of reputation? There! You had just
better smile. ... How dare you frighten me by making me think I had hurt
you! ... Besides, you are probably unrepentant."

She watched him closely for a moment or two, then, "Are you
unrepentant?"

"About what?"

"About your general wickedness? About--" she hesitated--"about that
girl, for example."

"What girl?" he asked coldly.

"That reminds me that you have told me absolutely nothing about her."

"There is nothing to tell," he said, in a tone so utterly new to her in
its finality that she sat up as though listening to an unknown voice.

Tone and words so completely excluded her from the new intimacy into
which she had imperceptibly drifted that both suddenly developed a
significance from sheer contrast. Who was this girl, then, of whom he
had absolutely nothing to say? What was she to him? What could she be to
him--an actress, a woman of common antecedents?

She had sometimes idly speculated in an indefinitely innocent way as to
just what a well-born man could find to interest him in such women; what
he could have to talk about to persons of that sort, where community of
tastes and traditions must be so absolutely lacking.

Gossip, scandal of that nature, hints, silences, innuendoes, the wise
shrugs of young girls oversophisticated, the cool, hard smiles of
matrons, all had left her indifferent or bored, partly from distaste,
partly from sheer incredulity; a refusal to understand, an innate
delicacy that not only refrains from comprehension, but also denies
itself even the curiosity to inquire or the temptation of vaguest
surmise on a subject that could not exist for her.

But now, something of the uncomfortable uneasiness had come over her
which she had been conscious of when made aware of Marion Page's worldly
wisdom, and which had imperceptibly chilled her when Grace Ferrall spoke
of Siward's escapade, coupling this woman and him in the same scandal.

She took it for granted that there must be, for men, an attraction
toward women who figured publicly behind the foot-lights, though
it appeared very silly to her. In fact it all was silly and
undignified--part and parcel, no d