admitted her to, but consciously
gazed upon; she was the show to-night, and she knew it. Her low, finely
modulated voice so rich in humor, so varied in color, had to-night an
edge on it that carried it beyond those she was immediately speaking to
and drew looks that found it hard to get away again. For the first time
in her life, with full self-consciousness, she was producing effects,
thrilling with the exercise of a power as obedient to her will as
electricity to the manipulator of a switchboard.

She was like a person driving an aeroplane, able to move in all three
dimensions. Pretty soon, of course, she'd have to come hack to earth,
where certain monstrously terrifying questions were waiting for her.

Madame Greville's final apothegm had suggested one of them. Was all she
valued in the world just so much fairy gold that would change over night
into dry leaves in her treasure chest because she had never earned
it--paid the price for it that life relentlessly exacts for all we may
be allowed to call ours?

Her tragi-comic scene with Rodney suggested another. What was her value
to him? Was she something enormously desirable when he wanted his hand
held and his eyes kissed, but an infernal nuisance when serious matters
were concerned? A fine and luxurious dissipation, not dangerous unless
recklessly indulged in, but to be kept strictly in her place? Before her
talk with Randolph she'd have laughed at that.

But did the horrible plausibility of what he had said actually cover the
truth? Did she owe that first golden hour with Rodney, his passionate
thrilling avowal of his life's philosophy, to nothing deeper in herself
than her unconscious power of rousing in him an equally unconscious,
primitive sex desire? Was the fine mutuality of understanding she had so
proudly boasted to her mother clear illusion? Now that the short circuit
had been established, would the lights never burn in the upper stories
of their house again? Turned about conversely the question read like
this: Was the thing that had, in Randolph himself, aroused his vivid
interest in the subject--well, nothing more than the daring cut of her
gown, the gleam of her jewels, the whiteness of her skin ...?

Those questions were waiting for her to come back to earth; and they
wouldn't get tired and go away. But for the present the knowledge that
they were there only made the aeroplane ride the more exhilarating.

She was called to the telephone just as she w