fairs. 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 pulse, 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 push 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 illusions. I couldn't make you understand our harvest; it is of
the broad sun and the sincerity of things."

"I know I must seem to you dreadfully out of it," Alicia said, wearing,
as it were, across her heaviness a lighter cloud of trouble.

But the other would not be stayed; she followed by compulsion her
impulse to the end. "Shall I be quite candid?" she said. "I find the
atmosphere about you, dear, a trifle exhausted."

Alicia, with a face of astonishment, made a half-movement toward the
window before she understood. There was some timidity in her glance at
Hilda and in her mechanical smile. "Oh," she said, "I see what you mean;
and I don't wonder. I am so literal--I have so little imagination."

"Don't talk of it as if it were money or fabric--something you could add
up or measure," Hilda cried remorselessly. "You have none!"

As if something slipped from her Alicia threw out locked hands. "At
least I had enough to know you when you came!" she cried. "I felt you,
too, and it's not my fault if there isn't enough of me to--to respond
properly. And I can't give you up. You seem to be the one valuable