CHAPTER II

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

"Yes, I have returned. I am here, veritably here, chère Madame et amie. At last I have effected my escape from the Land of Egypt and the House of Bondage—and such a bondage! Ah! it is an incredibly happy thing to be back!"

Adrian permitted himself to hold his hostess's hand some seconds longer than is demanded by strict etiquette. His face was as glad as a spring morning. Tender gallantry lurked in his eyes. His voice had a ring of joy irrepressible. His aspect was at once that of suppliant and of conqueror. And this whole brilliant effect was infectious, finding readier and more sympathetic reflection in Madame St. Leger's expression and humor than she at all intended or bargained for. For the moment, indeed, the charm and the rush of it came near sweeping her off her feet. She ceased to subscribe to theory, ceased to reason, yielded to spontaneous feeling, practice claiming her—the secular and delightful practice of he being man, she woman, and of both being fearless, high-spirited, beautifully human, and beautifully young.

"In any case the House of Bondage has not disagreed with you," she said, gaily. "For I have never seen you looking more admirably well."

"Ah! you must not put that down to the credit of the House of Bondage, but to the fact of my entrancing escape from it, to the fact that once more I am here—here—with you." As he spoke Adrian glanced round the dear rose-red-and-canvas-colored room. He wished to make sure that, in every detail, he found it precisely as he had left it, every article of furniture, every picture, every ornament in its accustomed position. He felt jealous of the minutest change of object or of place. "No, nothing is altered, nothing," he said, answering his own thought aloud in the greatness of his content.

Gabrielle abstained from comment. She owned herself moved, excited, uplifted, by the joyful atmosphere which his presence exhaled. Indeed, that presence affected her far more deeply than she had anticipated, catching her imagination and emotions as in the dazzling meshes of a golden net. Some men are gross, some absurd, some unspeakably tedious when in love. Adrian was very certainly neither of these objectionable things. He struck, indeed, an almost perfect note. And that was just where the danger came in, just why she dared not let this interview continue at the enthusiastic level. She might suffer the charm of it too comprehensively, and—for already she began to reason again—that would entail regret, and, only too likely, worse than regret.

So, steeling herself against the insidious charm which so worked on and quickened her, she moved away from the vacant place before the fire, where she had been standing with Adrian Savage, sat down in her high-backed, rose-cushioned chair and picked up the bundle of white lawn and lace lying on the little table beside it. She needed protection—whether from him or from herself she did not quite care to inquire—and reckoned it wiser to put a barrier of actual space and barrier of sobering employment between herself and this inconveniently moving returned guest and lover. She refused to be taken by storm.

But Adrian's buoyancy of spirit was not so easily to be crushed.

"Ah! only that was needed," he declared, "to complete my satisfaction—that you should place yourself thus and shake out your pretty needlework. It procures me the welcome belief that no time has really been lost or wasted; it almost convinces me that I have not been away at all. You cannot conceive what pleasure, what happiness it gives me, to be here, to see you again. But now that I am able to observe you calmly, chère Madame—"

"Yes, calmly, calmly," she put in, without raising her eyes from her stitching. "How I value, how I appreciate calm!"

"Do you not appear a little tired, a little pale?"

"Very possibly," she answered. "I have been troubled about my mother recently. The extreme cold affected her circulation. For some days we were in grave anxiety. Her vitality is low. Indeed, I have passed through some trying hours."

"And I was ignorant of her illness, ignorant of your anxiety! Why did you not write and tell me?"

"Does not the difficulty of answering letters one has never received occur to you?" Gabrielle inquired, mildly. "And it was not I, you know, who volunteered to write."

The young man had drawn a chair up to the near side of the little table. Now he leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, both hands extended, as one who offers a petition.

"Do not reproach me with my silence or I shall be broken-hearted," he said. "My inclination was to write reams to you, volumes. I did, in fact, begin many letters. But I restrained myself. I destroyed them. To have sent them would have been selfish and indiscreet. I was bound, by my promise to you at parting, not to allude to the subject which most vitally touches my happiness. And I found over there so much which was perplexing and sad. I asked myself what right I had to inflict upon you a recital of melancholy impressions and events. I came to the conclusion that I really had none."

Madame St. Leger looked at him sideways from between half-closed eyelids. The dimple showed in her cheek, but her smile was distinctly ironic.

"Why not admit that I was right in foretelling that you would find those shadowy ladies, and your mission to them, of absorbing interest? It occupied your time and thoughts to the exclusion of all else—now, was it not so? Was I not right?"

"Yes and no, chère Madame," he answered, presently, slowly and with so perceptible a change of tone that his hearer was startled to the point of finding it difficult to go on with her needlework.

Adrian sat silently watching her. The singular character of her beauty, both in its subtlety and suggestion of a reserve of moral force, had never been more evident to him. More than ever, in each gesture, in the long, suave lines of her body and limbs shrouded in clinging black, in the gleam of her furrowed hair as she turned or bent her charming head, in the abiding provocation and mystery of her eyes and lips, did she appear to him unique and infinitely desirable. Watching her, he inclined to become lyrical and cry aloud his worship in heroic fashion, careless of twentieth-century decorum and restraint. But if her room, the material frame and setting of that beauty, to his immense content remained unchanged in every particular, her attitude of mind, to his immense discontent, evidently remained unchanged likewise. In the first surprise of his arrival she had yielded somewhat, catching alight from his flame. But with a determined hand she shut down those sympathetic fires, becoming obdurate as before. He could feel her will sensibly stiffening against his own; and this at once hurt him shrewdly and whipped up passion, preaching a reckless war of conquest, bidding him disregard promises, bidding him speak and thunder down opposition by sheer law of the strongest. In every man worth the name temptation must arise, at moments, to beat the defiant beloved object into an obedient and docile jelly—the defiant beloved object, it may confidently be added, would regard any man as unworthy of serious consideration did it not. But, in Adrian's case, sitting watching her now, though such temptation did very really arise, its duration was brief. Less primitive counsels prevailed. She was far from kind and he was hotly in love; but he was also the child of his age, and a fine gentleman at that, to whom, given time for reflection, berserker methods must inevitably present themselves as both unworthy and ludicrous. So, if she condemned him to play a waiting game, he would bow to her ruling and play it. He had considerable capital of self-confidence to draw upon. In as far as the ultimate issues were concerned he wasn't a bit afraid—as yet. He could afford, so he believed, to wait. Only, since tormenting was about, all the fun of that amiable pastime shouldn't be on her side. And to this end now he would make her speak first.

He remained silent, therefore, still observing her, until the color deepened in the round of her cheeks, and the stitches were set less regularly in the white work, while uneasiness gained on her causing her presently to look up.

"Yes and no?" she said, "yes and no? That is nothing of an answer. I am all attention. I am curious to hear your explanation. And then—yes and no—what next?"

"This," he replied, "that on nearer acquaintance the two ladies proved anything but shadowy. They proved, in some respects, even a little tremendous. Far from being absorbed in them, I came alarmingly near being absorbed by them—which is a very different matter."

"Ah, that is interesting. You did not like them?"

"I really cannot say. They both—but particularly the elder sister, my cousin Joanna—were new to my experience. I do not feel that I have even yet placed them in my mind. The members of all nations above a certain social level can meet on common ground. It is below that level national tendencies and eccentricities actually declare themselves. I went over, strong in the conceit of ignorance. I supposed I knew all about it and should find myself quite at home. I was colossally mistaken. The manners and mental attitude of the provincial middle-class English were a revelation to me of the blighting effects of a sea frontier and a Puritan descent. The men have but three subjects of conversation—politics, games, and their own importance. The women"—Adrian paused, looking full at Madame St. Leger—"I am very, very sorry for the women. Ah! dear Madame," he added, "let us return devout thanks that we were born on this side, the humane, the amiable, the artistic side of the Channel, you and I. For they are really a very uncomfortable people those middle-class Anglo-Saxons. Until I spent this age-long three weeks among them I had no conception what a convinced Catholic—in sentiment, if not, to my shame, altogether in practice—and thorough-paced Latin I was!"

During the above harangue Gabrielle's hands remained idle. He was really very good, meeting her thus half-way in the suppression of the personal and amatory note. She was obliged to him, of course; yet, in honest truth, was she so very much pleased by his readiness to take the hint? She could not but ask herself that—and then hurry away, so to speak, from the answer, her fingers in her pretty ears. His cue was an intelligent exchange of ideas then? An excellent one!—She stopped her ears more resolutely.—She, too, would be intelligent.

"Increased faith and increased patriotism as the result of your journey! How admirable! Clearly it is highly beneficial to one's morale to cross the Channel. Were it rather later in the year, and were the weather less inclement, I should be disposed to take the little cure, without delay, myself."

"It would not suit you in the least," Adrian asserted. "You would dislike it all quite enormously."

Gabrielle St. Leger at the Tower House! The idea produced in him a violent unreasoning repulsion, as though she ran some actual physical danger. Heaven forbid!

"I should not go with any purpose of enjoyment, but rather as a penance, hoping the dislike of what I found over there might heighten my appreciation of all my blessings here at home."

Whereupon Adrian, careless of diplomacy, clutched at his chance.

"Then you are not so entirely satisfied, chère Madame et amie," he cried, laughing a little in his eagerness, "not so utterly happy and content!"

"Is one ever as devout, ever as patriotic, as one ought to be?" she asked, gravely.

"Or as sincere?" he returned, with corresponding gravity.

The hot color deepened in the young woman's face, and she picked up her needlework again quickly.

"I—insincere?" she asked. "Is not that precisely why you find me slightly vexatious, my dear Mr. Savage, that I am only too sincere, a veritable model of sincerity?"

And she rose, gracious, smiling, to receive another guest.

"Ah! ma toute belle, how are you, and how is the poor, darling mother? Better? Thank God for that! But still in her room? Dear! dear! Yet, after all, what can one expect? In such weather convalescence must necessarily be protracted. I am forced to come and ask for news in person since you refuse to have a telephone. Just consider the many annoying intrusions, such as the present, which that useful instrument would spare you!"

Anastasia Beauchamp, overdressed and genial as ever, interspersed these remarks with the unwinding of voluminous fox furs, all heads and tails and feebly dangling paws, the kissing of her hostess on either cheek, and finally a hand-shake to Adrian.

"So you are restored to us, my dear Savage," she continued. "I am more than delighted to see you, though at this moment I am well aware that delight is not reciprocated.—There, there, it is superfluous to perjure yourself by a denial.—And you are back just in time to write a scathing criticism of your protégé M. Dax's exhibition, in the Review. Here is matter for sincere congratulation, for, believe me, very plain speaking is demanded. The newspapers are afraid of him. They cringe. Their pusillanimity is disgusting. Really this time he has broken his own record! It is just these things which create a wrong impression and bring France into bad odor with other nations. He is a traitor to the best traditions of the art of this country. I deplore it from that point of view. His exhibition is a scandal. The correctional police should step in."

"You have yourself visited the exhibition, dear Anastasia?" Madame St. Leger inquired, demurely.

"Naturally, I have been to see it. Don't I see everything which is going? Isn't that my acknowledged little hobby, my dear? Then, too, where does the benefit of increasing age come in unless you claim the privileges of indiscretion conferred by it? Still, even in senile indiscretion, one should observe a decent limit. I went alone, absolutely alone, to inspect those abominable productions. I wore a thick veil, too, and—I blushed behind it. Needless to relate, I now and then quivered with laughter. One is but human after all, and to be human is also to be diverted by impropriety. But I could have whipped myself for laughing, even though quite alone and behind the veil. Go and judge for yourself whether I am not justified in my disgust, my dear Savage. And as for you, ma toute belle, do not, I implore you, go at all—unless you have had the misfortune to do so already—even though going would effectually cure you of any kindness you may entertain toward the artist—an end, in my poor opinion, greatly to be desired."

"I have not seen M. Dax's exhibition, nor have I seen M. Dax himself for some length of time," Gabrielle remarked, quietly.

"You have dropped him? I rejoice to hear it. A man of so villainous an imagination is unfit to approach you."

"I will not say that I have dropped him." As she spoke she was aware that Adrian looked keenly, inquiringly at her. And this displeased her, as an intrusion upon her liberty of action. "M. Dax has a charming devotion to my little Bette," she continued. "No one whom I know is so perfect a playfellow to children. His sympathy with them is extraordinary. He understands their tastes and pleasures, and is unwearied in his kindness to them. Only, perhaps, his games are a little overstimulating, overexciting. After his last visit my poor Bette suffered from agitating dreams and awoke in the night frightened and crying. I had difficulty in soothing her."

"Praiseworthy babe, how profoundly right are her instincts!" Miss Beauchamp declared, fervently. "But, Heaven help us, what's this!" she added, under her breath. "Perfidious infant, how these praiseworthy babies can fool one!"

She nodded and beckoned to Adrian, still speaking under her breath.

"As you value my friendship, don't go, on no account go, my dear Savage. Come and sit here by me and tell me about your time in England. Like the chivalrous young man you are, stick to me. Supply me with a valid excuse for remaining. For, manners or no manners, I am resolved not to leave her alone with that depraved little horror. I am resolved to outstay him."

CHAPTER III

A STRAINING OF FRIENDSHIP

Bette, light-footed, sprightly, in beaver cap, pelisse, and muff, brown cloth gaiters and boots to match, her face pink from air and exercise, her eyes wide and bright with consciousness of temerity, spricketed toward her mother, leading René Dax by the hand.

"I found him outside in the courtyard as I returned from my walk with my little friends," she piped, the words tumbling over one another in her pretty haste. "He told me that he wished so much to see us, but that he never found us at home now. And he looked unhappy. You have always instructed me that it is our duty to console the unhappy. So I informed him that I knew you were at home to-day, because you would not leave my grandmother, and I assured him that, speaking in your name, it would give us much pleasure to receive him. And then I invited him to come up-stairs with me. And that was all quite proper, wasn't it, mamma, because we do not like him to be unhappy, and it does give us pleasure to receive M. Dax, does it not?"

"Assuredly it gives us pleasure to receive M. Dax," Gabrielle said, her head carried high and a just perceptible ring of defiance in her voice.

She smiled graciously upon the young man, and for an instant the three stood hand in hand—René Dax, the Tadpole, offering the very strangest of connecting links between the beautiful mother and delicious little girl.

Miss Beauchamp uttered a sharp exclamation, which she vainly attempted to mask by a cough. Adrian Savage looked, saw, and turned his back. He stared blindly out of window at Paris beneath, sparkling in the keen-edged February sunshine. The sweat broke out on his forehead. He had received an agonizing, a hateful impression, amounting, sound and self-confident though he was, to acute physical pain. "No, not that, not that," he cried to himself. "Of all conceivable combinations, not that one. It is hideous, unbearable, out of nature!"

Miss Beauchamp touched him on the arm. Her face spoke volumes.

"Talk to me, my dear Savage," she said, urgently. "I can imagine what you feel. But talk. Create some, any excuse for staying, and take It, that depraved little horror, away with you when you go. Rally your resources, my dear friend. Play up, I entreat you, play up."

Then louder.

"You had a deplorable crossing—fog, coming into Calais? Yes, February is among the most odious months of the year. But I go over so seldom now, you know, since my poor brother's death. Nearly all my friends are on this side; and, after all, one only has to wait. Everybody who is anybody must pass through Paris sooner or later.—Talk, my dear Savage, talk. Support me.—Ah yes, in London you observed many changes? I hear a mania has taken the authorities lately for improvements. You did not stay in town? Ah no, of course not. Stourmouth?—Yes, I remember the place vaguely. Interminable black fir-trees and interminable, perambulating pink-and-white consumptives—I like neither. Yes, talk—talk—my own remarks are abysmal in their fatuity. But no matter. It's all in a good cause. Let us keep on."

René, meanwhile, successfully affected ignorance of any human presences save those of his hostess and his little guide.

"Why have you refused me? Why have you never let me see you?" he asked, gazing mournfully at Madame St. Leger.

"I have not been receiving," she replied. "My mother has been ailing, and my time has been devoted to her."

"But to see me, even to be aware that I was near her, would have done her good," he returned. "She has a great regard for me; and, in the case of a sensitive organization, the proximity of a person to whom one is attached acts as a restorative. It was on that account I have needed to come here. I, too, have been ailing. My exhibition is a howling success. Being a person of refinement, this naturally has disagreed with me, inducing repeated fits of the spleen, flooring me with a dumb rage of melancholy. As a corrective I required the soothing society of Madame, your mother, and of Mademoiselle Bette. I required also to be with you, Madame, to look at you. This I believed would prove beneficial to my nerves, lacerated by frenzied public admiration. By excluding me, you have not only wounded my susceptibilities, but prolonged my ill health. As I have already proved to you, Madame Vernois's regrettable illness is no sufficient reason for that exclusion. There must have been some further reason."

"There was a further reason," Gabrielle replied, quietly.

René gazed up at her, a point of flame in his somber eyes. All of a sudden, with an amazingly quick, very vulgar, street-boy gesture and a wicked grimace, tipping his thumb over his shoulder, he indicated the other two guests holding uneasy converse at the other side of the room. The thing was done in a twinkling, and he regained his accustomed plaintive solemnity of aspect.

"What further reason, that he, the janitor, otherwise Adrian the Magnificent, was away?"

"You are impertinent," Madame St. Leger said, sternly. At first her anger concentrated itself upon René Dax. Then, quite arbitrarily and unjustly, it took a wider sweep. She called Bette to her; and, kneeling down, the train of her dress trailing out across the rosy carpet, her head bowed, began undoing the frogs of the child's fur pelisse.

"Pray understand," she said, still sternly, "Mr. Savage's presence or absence is a matter which in no degree affects my actions."

While in the pause which followed Adrian's voice, harsh from his effort to make it sound quite disengaged and natural, asserted itself forcibly.

"Yes," he was saying, "Colonel Rentoul Haig.—You cannot surely have been so heartless as to have forgotten his existence, dear Miss Beauchamp, when he retains such enthusiastic memories of you and of the brilliancy of your conversation?"

"Rentoul Haig? Rentoul Haig? Ah! to be sure! I have it at last. Yes, certainly, in the early eighties, at my cousin Delamere Beauchamp's place in Midlandshire. Of course, of course—a neat, little, tea-party subaltern, out in camp with some militia regiment, in general request for answering questions and running messages, and so on; qualifying, even then, as a walking hand-book of the English landed and titled gentry."

"He has continued in that line until his genealogical learning has reached truly monumental proportions," Adrian returned, in the same harsh voice. "It possesses and obsesses him, keeping him in a perpetual ferment of apprehension lest he should be called upon to associate with persons of no family in particular. In this connection my arrival, I fear, caused him cruel searchings of heart. His mother and my father were hundredth cousins. Hence, alarms. Should I prove presentable to the funny old gentlemen at the local club, or should I compromise him? He has hardly marched with the times, and pictured me—this I learned from his own ingenuous lips—as some long-haired, threadbare, starveling Bohemian, straight out of the pages of Henri Mürger or Eugène Sue. My personal appearance did, I rejoice to say, reassure him to a certain extent. But your name, and recollections both of your cousin's fine place and of your own conversational powers, did much more toward allaying the torment of his social sense. He ended, indeed, by conveying to me that, my beloved mother's alien nationality and my beloved father's profession notwithstanding, I was really quite a credit to the united houses of Savage and Haig."

"Are you going again to exclude me, are you going to shut the door on me, because I have been that which you qualify by the word 'impertinent'?" René Dax asked, softly and sadly, as Madame St. Leger—the little girl's coat removed and her frilled white skirts straightened out—rose proudly to her feet.

"You richly deserve that I should do so," she replied.

"Ah! pardon—but just consider. For to be cross with me, to repudiate me, is so conspicuously useless. It only serves to accentuate my faults—always supposing I really have any. I am controlled, I am led, by kindness, and I possess most engaging qualities. In the interests of all concerned you should encourage the display of those qualities."

"Pray do not be severe with M. Dax any more," little Bette put in, prettily and busily. "You have, perhaps, dear mamma, been so on my account, therefore it is for me to plead with you."

Madame St. Leger's expression softened. The Tadpole, his big overdeveloped brain and puny body, touched the springs of maternal compassion in her, somehow. She glanced at him. Surely she had exaggerated the disturbing influences which could be exercised by so quaint and relatively insignificant a creature? Then, stooping down, she took little Bette up in her arms, smiling, her figure finely poised, both in lifting and bearing the weight of that graceful burden. In an ecstasy of affection the child snuggled against her, cheek to cheek.

"I am no longer afraid of his little walking-cane," Bette murmured, in a confidential whisper. "That was a silly dream. I assure you I shall not allow it to trouble me, should it repeat itself. So I entreat you, mamma, tell M. Dax he may come here again and play with me and my little friends as he used to do."

Gabrielle's smile sweetened to a tender merriment. With her child pressed close against her, thus, she felt so satisfied, so secure in the strong, pure joys of her motherhood, that she gave caution the slip. So safeguarded, what, she asked herself, could disquiet her soul or harm her? René Dax was right, moreover, in saying he possessed engaging qualities—though it mightn't be the best taste in the world that he, himself, should announce the fact. What a good work, then, to nurture those qualities, and, by keeping them in play, strengthen and redeem all that was best in the young man's complex and wayward nature! A quite missionary spirit, toward the singular Tadpole, arose in her. And something further—though this she did not willingly acknowledge—namely, a hot desire to assert the completeness of her personal liberty before witnesses just now present. She would conserve her freedom, and demonstrate unequivocally to present company that she intended so doing.

"Good, most precious one," she said, returning the child's fluttering kisses. Then: "Since my little daughter wishes it, the door shall remain open, M. Dax."

But here Adrian Savage, partially overhearing the conversation, partially divining that purpose of demonstration, smitten, moreover, by Madame St. Leger's resolved and exalted aspect, was overcome by alarm and distress altogether too acute for further concealment. Miss Beauchamp might wave her long, thin arms, and pour forth cascades of transparently artificial conversation in the effort to delay his departure, but he could bear the position no longer. She, after all, was actuated by motives of social expediency and of friendship only, was merely an onlooker at this drama, while he was a principal actor in it, all his dearest hopes, all his future happiness at stake. He had reached the limits of moral and emotional endurance. His handsome face was drawn and blanched to an unnatural pallor as against his black, pointed beard, black eyebrows, and dark, close-cropped hair. A few moments more and he felt he might be guilty of some irretrievable breach of good manners, might make a scene, commit some unpardonable folly of speech and action, or that just simply he might collapse, might faint. So, then and there, he bounded tiger-like, so to speak, into the open space before the fire where his hostess still stood, addressing her rapidly, imperatively, wholly ignoring her companion, René Dax.

"Pardon me, Madame, that I interrupt you, but I have already, as I fear, greatly outstayed your patience and will delay no further to bid you good-by. My excuse, both for coming to-day and for remaining so long, must be that I am here, in Paris, probably for but a few days on the business of the Review. I may be recalled to England at any moment, and it is conceivable in the press of work which demands my attention that I may not have another opportunity of presenting myself to you before I go."

"Behold Vesuvius in full eruption," René murmured, gazing pensively at his hostess.

The latter had stood little Bette down on the seat of the rose-cushioned chair. She still held the child close, one arm round her waist. The unaccustomed tones of Adrian's voice, his vehemence, and air of unmistakable suffering, agitated her. Was it the price of her independence to hurt a faithful friend so sorely as all this?

"I was unaware you were likely to leave Paris again so soon," she said. "I supposed you had returned for good; and there is so much that I wished to hear, so much that I had promised myself the entertainment of having you recount to me."

"Unfortunately the claims of my venerable cousin's affairs are inexorable," Adrian replied, with a not very successful attempt at lightness, looking her in the eyes while his lips perceptibly shook. "In death, as in life, he has proved himself an unscrupulously devouring old tyrant. Indeed, I am quite unable to forecast, as yet, when I shall escape out of the house of bondage for good."

"Mamma, dearest," little Bette whispered, politely, "I like it of course, but you will excuse me if I mention that you are squeezing me so very tight?"

And thereupon, somehow, Gabrielle's gentler mood evaporated. She ceased to be touched by the young man's troubled aspect, or to regret her share in the production of that trouble. She felt angry, though not very certainly with innocent Bette. Mockery supplanted concern in the expression of her beautiful face as she gave her hand to her unhappy lover.

"In time the arrangement of even the richest succession must be terminated. When that termination is reached we shall hope to welcome you back, Mr. Savage—unless, of course, you have any thought of forming ties which will necessitate your settling permanently in England?"

And, before Adrian had either time or heart to parry this cruel thrust, René intervened, patting him delicately on the back.

"So you are going, mon vieux? See, I will accompany you. No, no—indeed, I gladly go with you, leaving Mademoiselle Beauchamp—who detests me—as she so earnestly desires, in possession of the field of battle. Why should I not go, my dear fellow? You do not hurry my departure in the least. I have accomplished the object of my visit. I am restored, soothed comforted. I have got all—all that, for the moment, I want."

As the door closed behind the two young men Anastasia advanced. She re-adjusted her frisky hat, pulled her long gloves up at the elbow, cast the heads and tails and feebly dangling paws of her fox furs about her neck and shoulders.

"Ma toute belle, at the risk of your being angry and requesting me to mind my own business, I am constrained to tell you that I fear you are committing a very grave folly," she said.

But Madame St. Leger was engaged in caressing little Bette.

"My poor angel, did I hurt you?" she asked. "Forgive me. I am ten thousand times sorry.—A grave folly, dear Anastasia? Ah no, believe me, you are altogether

CHAPTER IV

IN WHICH ADRIAN SETS FORTH IN PURSUIT OF THE
FURTHER REASON

Coming from under the porte-cochère into the street, Adrian, pleading a business appointment as excuse, shook off his companion somewhat unceremoniously, and hailing the first empty motor-cab, sped away to the office, his Review, in the rue Druoi. The rush across the center of Paris, through the thick of the afternoon traffic, with its lively chances of smashing or being smashed, served to steady him. Yet he was still under the empire of considerable emotion when he entered his private room at the office, and Emile Konski, his secretary, a roundabout, pink-cheeked, gray-headed, alert little man of fifty, arose bowing and beaming to relieve him of hat, coat, and umbrella.

"Thanks, thanks, my good Konski," he said. "And now just arrange the copy I have to revise, will you kindly, and take your own work into the outer office. I am rather hurried. I will call through to you should I want you."

"Perfectly, sir," the good Konski returned, obediently; but he beamed no more. His employer was also the god of his ingenuous idolatry, and to leave the private room for the outer office was to leave the Sanctuary for the Court of the Gentiles. Opportunities of devotion had been limited lately, hence banishment became the more grievous.

Once alone, Adrian sat down before his writing-table. The fortnightly chronique of home and foreign politics awaited his revision, so did literary and art notices. Among the latter a critique of René Dax's picture-show remained to be written, Adrian having expressed an intention of dealing with it himself. He meant to have passed an hour in the galleries after calling upon Madame St. Leger this afternoon, but had relinquished his purpose. For he desired rightly to divide the word of truth regarding René's eccentric performances; and just now, for reasons quite independent of their inherent merits or demerits, he feared they might stink in his nostrils to a degree subversive of any just exercise of the critical faculty.

He made an honest effort to settle to work and absorb himself in the affairs of Morocco, the last new books, the last debates in the Chamber. But the neatly typed words and sentences proved singularly lacking in interest or meaning. He read them over and over again, only to find them crumble into purposeless units, like so much dry sand, incapable of cohesion. For what mattered—so, in a crisis, is even the cleverest of us dominated by personal feeling—what mattered the future of Morocco, for instance, though involving possibilities of war to all Europe, as against the future of himself, Adrian Savage?

And that future did, unquestionably, present itself just now as lamentably parlous. That he might fail, that Madame St. Leger might eventually and finally refuse to marry him, had never really seriously entered his head before. That he might have to diplomatize, to lay long and patient siege to the enchanting and enchanted beleaguered city before it fell he had long ago accepted; but that, in the end, it would most assuredly fall and he rapturously claim it by right of conquest, in his triumphant masculine optimism he had never, till this afternoon, doubted. Now the doubt did very really present itself and proved a staggering one. Nor was this all. For, save during those first few delicious moments of greeting he had been sensible of a sinister element battling against him, painfully affecting him, yet which he failed to define or to grasp.

Adrian stared at the copy outspread on his blotting-pad, and its blank, unmeaning sentences. Never before had he realized what a terrible, imprisoning, stultifying thing it may be to love! Morocco? Morocco? What, in the name of all which makes a man's life worth living, did he care about the fate of that forbidding North African coast? Let it stew in its own barbarous juice! All the same, his inability to concentrate his attention upon the subject of that disagreeable country served to increase his perturbation and distress. Thanks to admirable physical health, he was accustomed to have his faculties thoroughly and immediately at command, and this refusal of his brain to work to order fairly infuriated him.

There was the critique of René Dax's picture-show to be written, too!

Adrian rose from the table and walked restlessly, almost distractedly, about the room. For where exactly, in respect of the resistance of that beloved beleaguered city, did René come in? Oh! that Tadpole of perverted genius, that perniciously clever Tadpole, who from childhood he had protected and befriended, whose fortunes he had so assiduously pushed! And again now, as when staring forth blindly from the high-set windows of la belle Gabrielle's thrice-sacred drawing-room at Paris, glittering in the sharp-edged sunshine, Adrian's whole being cried aloud against the blasphemy of a certain conceivable, yet inconceivable, combination in a passionate, agonized "God forbid!"

But verbal protest against that combination, however loud-voiced and vehement, ranging ineffectually within the narrow confines of his office, was a transparently inadequate mode of self-expression. His native impetuosity rendered uncertainty and suspense intolerable to him. He must act, must make a reconnaissance, must discover some means of ascertaining whether anything had occurred during his absence which served to explain the apparently existing situation. But, here, the intrinsic delicacy of the said situation asserted itself; since precisely those questions to which an answer is most urgently needed are the questions which a person of fine feeling cannot ask. Good breeding, sensibility, a chivalrous regard for the feelings of others are, as he reflected, at times a quite abominable handicap.

He sat down once again at the writing-table. What should he do? At his elbow stood the ebonized upright of the telephone, the long, green, silk-covered wire of it trailing away across the parquet floor to the plug in the wainscot. From a man he could not ask advice or information. But from a woman—surely it was different, permissible? Adrian left off pulling the ends of his upturned mustache and meditated. Distraction slightly lifted and lessened. He looked up an address in the directory; and, after an at first polite then slightly acrimonious parley with the operator at the exchange, got into communication with the person wanted. Would she be at home to-night after dinner, say about eight forty-five? Might he call? And, with multiplied apologies, might he depend upon finding her alone? To these questions the replies proved satisfactory, so that, in a degree solaced, his thirst for immediate action in a measure appeased and his scattered wits consequently once more fairly at command, Adrian resolutely turned his attention to the affairs of neglected Morocco.

As to René Dax's exhibition? Well, till to-morrow, at all events, it must wait.

Ever since he could remember, Miss Beauchamp had occupied the same handsome, second-floor flat in a quiet street just off the Parc Monceau. Adrian recalled a visit, in company with his mother, made to her there at a period when he still wore white frilled drawers and long-waisted holland tunics. Later, during his early school-days, he vaguely recollected a period during which his grandmother rarely mentioned Anastasia, and then with a suggestive pursing up of the lips and lift of the eyebrows. Afterward he came to know how, for some years, Miss Beauchamp's name had been rather conspicuously associated with that of a certain famous Hungarian composer resident in Paris. But the said composer had long since gone the way of all flesh, and the question as to whether his and Anastasia's friendship was, or was not, strictly platonic in character had long since ceased to interest society. Other stars rose and set in the musical firmament. Other scandals, real or imaginary, offered food for discussion to those greedy of such fly-blown provender. Miss Beauchamp, meanwhile, had become an institution; was received—as the phrase goes—everywhere. Report declared her rich. Her generosity to young musicians, artists, and literati was, unquestionably, large to the verge of prodigality.

The aspect of her domicile, when he entered it this evening, struck Adrian as much the same now as on that long-ago visit with his mother. The suite of living-rooms was lofty, having coved and painted ceilings, captivating to his childish fancy. The rooms opened one from another in a sequence of three. The two first, both somewhat encumbered with furniture, pictures, and bric-à-brac—of very varying value and merit—were dimly lighted and vacant, places of silence and shadows, the atmosphere of them impregnated with a scent of cedar and sandal wood. From the third, the doorway of which was masked by thick curtains of Oriental embroidery, came the sound of a grand piano, played, and in masterly fashion, by a man's hands.

Adrian stopped abruptly, turning to the elderly maid.

"Miss Beauchamp informed me she would be alone," he said.

"Mademoiselle is alone," the maid answered. "She gave instructions no one was to be admitted save monsieur."

"Thanks—I will not detain you. I will announce myself," Adrian said.

He crossed the second and larger room, threading his way in and out of a perfect archipelago of furniture; and held one curtain partially aside, while the purpose of his visit and the smart of his own distractions alike were merged in a sensation of curiosity and surprise.

Miss Beauchamp sat at a grand piano, placed in the middle of the bare polished floor at right angles to the doorway. Adrian saw her face and high-shouldered, high-waisted figure in profile. She wore a cinnamon-colored tea-gown, opening over an under-dress of copper sequin-sewn net. A veritable pagoda of fiery curls crowned her head. Yet, though thin and bony, hers were the man's hands which compelled such rich, forcible music from the piano, making it speak, declaim, sing, plead, touch tragedy, triumphantly affirm, in this so very convincing a manner. The method and mind of the player, in their largeness of conception and fearless security of execution, held the young man captive, raising his whole attitude and outlook to a nobler plane. The music, indeed, carried his imagination up to regions heroic. He was in no haste to have it cease. He waited, therefore.

When the final chords were struck Anastasia Beauchamp, raising her hands from the keyboard, rested the tips of her fingers upon the edge of the empty music-desk, and sat motionless, absorbed in thought. Then, as the seconds passed, Adrian's position became, in his opinion, equivocal, courtesy demanding that he should either make his presence known or withdraw. He chose the former alternative and, taking a step forward, let the curtain fall into place behind him. Imperiously, with a lift of the chin, Miss Beauchamp turned her head and looked full at him; and, for a moment, the young man was fairly taken aback. For, setting of flaming pagoda and frisky tea-gown notwithstanding, he beheld a countenance no longer bizarre, that of an accredited jester, but sibylline, that of a woman who, in respect of certain departments of human knowledge, has touched ultimate wisdom, so that, in respect of those departments, life has no further secrets to reveal. Here was something outpacing the province of Adrian's self-confident, young masculine attainment; and it was to his credit that he instantly recognized this, accepting it with quick-witted and intuitive sympathy.

"Forgive me if I have presumed upon your indulgence, dear lady," he said, advancing with a disarming air of admiration and modesty, "by remaining here unannounced. I could not permit any interruption of your wonderful playing. It would have amounted to profanity. Your art is sublime, is so altogether impressively great. But oh! why," he added, as the sibylline countenance softened somewhat, "have you elected to let me, to let your many friends, remain in ignorance? Why have you deprived us all of the joy of your superb musical gift?"

"Because that gift served its turn very fully many years ago, when you, my dear Savage, were little more than a baby," she answered. "Since then I have felt at liberty to regard my playing as a trifle of private property which I might keep to and for myself."

As she spoke Miss Beauchamp rose from her seat at the piano, and began replacing a multiplicity of bracelets and rings, laid aside during the performance.

"As we grow older we, most of us, are disposed to practise such reservations, I suppose, whether openly acknowledged or not," she continued. "They may take their rise in inclinations of a sentimental, avaricious, or penitential nature; but, however divergent their cause, their object is identical—namely, to keep intact one's individuality, menaced by the disintegrating wear and tear of outward things. The tendency of the modern world is to render one invertebrate, to pound one's character and opinions into a pulp. In self-defense one is forced to reserve and to cultivate some hidden garden, wherein one's poor, battered individual me may walk in assuaging solitude and recollection. Especially"—she looked bravely at Adrian through the shaded light, while her long-armed, ungainly, rusty-gold figure, and strangely wise face surmounted by that flaming top-knot, appeared to him more than ever impressive—"especially, perhaps, is this the case if that garden once represented—as my music possibly once did—a Garden of Paradise in which one did not walk altogether solitary. But, come. You want to speak to me. Let us go into the drawing-room and have our talk there."

"Let us talk, by all means," Adrian put in, quickly, "but let it be here, please. This room is sympathetic—full of splendid echoes good for the soul."

Anastasia's expression softened yet more.

"That is charmingly said. We will stay here, since you wish it. The sofa? Yes, this is my corner—thanks. And now, to be quite frank with you, understand that I had lost count of time and you were inordinately punctual, or you wouldn't have caught me making music. And understand, further, that had I not been unusually moved, by something which occurred this afternoon, I should not have made music at all. I rarely walk in the hidden garden now. As one grows older one has to economize one's emotions. They are too tiring, liable to endanger one's sleep afterward. But this evening circumstances, associations, were too strong for me. The garden called to me and—I walked."

CHAPTER V

WITH DEBORAH, UNDER AN OAK IN THE PARC MONCEAU

Miss Beauchamp leaned back against the piled-up sofa cushions shading her eyes with her left hand; and that hand must have been a little unsteady, since Adrian heard the bracelets upon her wrist rattle and clink.

"Shall I tell you what the something was which so moved me?" she asked. "Unless I am greatly mistaken it is the main cause of our present interview, so that to speak of it may help to make that interview easier for us both."

"Pray tell me." Adrian felt curious as to what should follow; but his curiosity was tempered by deepening respect.

"It comes to this, then, my dear young man, I think," she said. "For those who have once been acquainted with true love—I am not speaking of mere sexual passion, still less of silly flirtations or wanton amorettes—those who have once known that uniquely beautiful and illuminating condition can neither forget nor mistake it. They carry an infallible touchstone in their own eyes, and ears, and hearts. It is my privilege to carry such a touchstone; and this afternoon—there, there, don't wince; quite, quite reverently and gently I put my finger on the fact—I beheld true love again; but true love tormented and far from happy. Wasn't it so?"

"Yes," Adrian replied, with a touch of bitterness, "it was."

"And that brought certain events and experiences—your dear mother's sympathy and friendship among them—so vividly before me that I could only come home here, to this practically deserted room, and make music, as long ago, when another man, another true lover, sat where you now sit. Do you follow me?"

Adrian's heart was somewhat full. He bowed his head in silent assent.

"The ice is satisfactorily broken then? I am an old woman now. Many people, I don't doubt, describe me as a flighty, prankish old spinster, who apes departed youth in a highly ridiculous manner."

She no longer shaded her eyes with her hand, but looked full at Adrian, through the quiet light, smiling—half sibyl, half jester, but, as he felt, wholly wise, wholly kind.

"Such criticisms matter to me rather less than nothing," she continued, "since the hidden garden knows the why and wherefore of all that, and more besides. And now, my dear boy, I have said enough, I think, to show you that you can unburden yourself without reserve or hesitation. You will not speak to me of an undiscovered country."

But just then Adrian felt it difficult to speak. Coming to this woman, he had found so much more than he had asked for or expected—namely, a finding of high romance, of almost reckless generosity, which made him feel humble, feel indeed quite quaintly ignorant and inexperienced. It followed that, when he did speak, he did so in child-like fashion, protesting his innocence as though needing to disarm censure.

"Believe me, I have not acted unworthily," he said. "From the first I was charmed, I was enthralled, but I made every effort to restrain myself. Even in thought I was loyal to poor St. Leger. I did my best to conceal my admiration—I kept away, as much as I could without discourtesy. You see, her very perfection is, in a sense, her safeguard, for how inconceivably vile to endanger the peace of mind of so adorable a creature by any hint, any suggestion! It is only since St. Leger's death that I—"

"Yes, yes, I take all that for granted," Anastasia broke in. "Doesn't it stand to reason, since we are talking of true love?"

And Adrian could not forbear to smile, notwithstanding his humbled condition; the touch was so deliciously feminine in its assumption and non-logic. Unless, by chance, she was laughing at him out of her larger wisdom? Possibly she was. Well, she could do nothing but right, anyhow—so he didn't care! Whereupon he proceeded to pour forth the history of his affection in all its phases, from its first inception to the existing moment, with dramatic fervor, spreading abroad his hands descriptively, while the sentences galloped with increasing velocity and the mellow, baritone voice rose and fell.

"Ah! and can you not conceive it? After that dismal time in England, burying the dead, contending with all manner of tiresomenesses, with narrow-minded, over-strenuous, over-educated women and men—ye gods, such men!—to come back, to see her, was like coming from some underground cavern into the sunshine. She received me exquisitely. I tasted ecstasy. I was transported by hope. Then, abruptly, her manner changed; and that change did not appear to me spontaneous, but calculated—as though, in obedience to some alien influence, she unwillingly put a constraint upon herself. Since then I have reconstituted the scene repeatedly—"

"My poor dear boy!" Anastasia murmured.

"Yes, repeatedly, repeatedly. I try to convince myself that her change of manner was unwilling, not the result of caprice."

"Madame St. Leger is not capricious."

"I am sure of it. Her nature, at bottom, is serious. She reasons and obeys reason. But in this case what reason? Not dislike of me? No, no, my mind refuses such an explanation of her conduct. It would be too horrible, too desolating."

"Isn't there another rather obvious explanation of Madame St. Leger's attitude—the fear of liking you a little too much?"

"But why should she fear to like me?" poor Adrian cried. "I am no devouring monster! I have some talent, sufficient means, and no concealed vices."

And there the thought of René Dax invaded him, scorching him with positively rampant jealousy and repulsion. For could this, which he had just asserted regarding himself, be asserted with equal truth regarding the Tadpole of genius? He knew very well it could not. Still, even so, he shrank from the rôle of treacherous friend or detractor.

"She can be gracious enough to others," he contented himself by saying, gazing at his hostess meanwhile, his expression altogether orphaned and pathetic.

"Dangerously gracious. And that is why I did all in my power to delay your departure this afternoon, although I knew perfectly well you were on the rack."

"But, dear God in heaven!" he broke out, incoherently, burying his face in both hands, "you cannot imply, you cannot intend to convey to me your belief—"

"That Gabrielle St. Leger contemplates marrying that libelous little horror, M. Dax? Never in life!"

Adrian got up and walked unsteadily—for indeed the floor seemed to shift and lurch beneath his feet—across the room. Without the faintest conception of what he was looking at, he minutely examined a landscape hanging upon the opposite wall. He also blew his nose and wiped his eyes. While Anastasia Beauchamp, her jaw set, leaning back against the sofa cushions, very actually and poignantly walked in that hidden garden of hers—once a Garden of Eden, and not an Adamless one—wrapped about by remembrance.

After a time the young man came back and sat down beside her. His face was white and his eyes were luminous.

"Most dear and kind friend, forgive me," he said, very gently. "I have climbed giddy pinnacles of rapture, and tumbled off them—plop—into blackest morasses of despair to-day, and my nerves have suffered."

"Ah! it has got you!" she returned. "I'm not a bit sorry for you. On the contrary, I congratulate you. For you are very handsomely and hopelessly in love."

Adrian nodded assent, pushing up the ends of his mustache with a twist of his fingers and smiling.

"Yes, yes, indeed I know," he said. "It is a thing for which to be immeasurably thankful. Yet, all the same, it has its little hours of inconvenience, as I have to-day discovered. It can hold the field to the exclusion of all else; and that with a quite demoralizing intensity, making one feel murderous toward one's oldest friends and, in respect of one's work, no better than a driveling idiot."

"Such are inevitable symptoms of the blessed state. I still congratulate you."

"But you admit, at least, that they are practically extremely impeding? And so, dear Mademoiselle, you whom my mother loved and who loved my mother, you who have done so much to help and comfort me in the last half-hour—will you do something more?"

"I suppose I shall," Anastasia answered, with a laugh which was against herself rather than against him. "I seem to be pretty thoroughly committed to this business for—well, for two people's sakes, perhaps."

"Yes, for her sake also—for hers as well as mine," Adrian cried, impetuously. "Those few words are beautifully full of encouragement. For see here," he went on, "in some ways I am just simply an obstinate, pig-headed Englishman. You permit me to speak quite freely? Loosing her, I cannot console myself elsewhere. It is not merely a wife that I want; having reached the age when a man should range himself a well-bred, healthy, and generally unexceptionable mother for his children! Don't imagine that I would not like to make my subscription to humanity in the form of charming babies. Of course I should. Still those small people, however beguiling, are not to the point in this connection. I am not in pursuit of a suitable marriage, but of—"

"La belle Gabrielle—only and solely la belle Gabrielle—that must be conspicuously evident to the meanest intelligence," Anastasia put in, merrily. "But there, unfortunately, we run up against the crux of the whole situation. For, it is only fair to tell you, our exquisite young woman is even less in pursuit of a suitable marriage than you yourself are. We have had some intimate conversations, she and I. Don't imagine for an instant your name, or any other name, has been hinted at, much less mentioned. But she has been good enough to bestow her confidence upon me, in as far as she bestows it upon any one. Fundamentally she is a mysterious creature, and that's exactly why, I suppose, one finds her so endlessly interesting. And, from those conversations, I gather her mind is set on things quite other than marriage."

"Ah! just Heaven—and what things, then?" poor Adrian exclaimed, distraction again threatening him.

"She would, I think, have very great difficulty in telling you."

Here distraction did more than threaten. It jumped on him, so that in his agitation he positively bounced, ball-like, upon the seat of the sofa.

"I knew it," he cried. "I was sure of it. Almost immediately I detected an alien and inimical influence intrude itself between us, as I have already told you, and battle against me. And this was the more detestable to me because I felt powerless to combat it, being ignorant whence it came and what its nature actually was."

Miss Beauchamp looked at him indulgently. And he, distraction notwithstanding, perceived that her countenance once more had grown sibylline. This served sensibly to quiet and steady him.

"I fancy that influence comes from very deep and very far," she said. "A woman of so much temperament and so much intelligence as Gabrielle St. Leger must, of necessity, be the child of the age in which she lives, in touch with the spirit of it. Her eyes are turned toward the future, and the strange unrestful wind, the wind of Modernity, which blows from out the future, is upon her face. This is the influence you have to battle against, my dear young man, I am afraid, nothing less than the Spirit of the Age, the spirit of Modernity. You have your work cut out for you! To combat it successfully will be—to put it vulgarly—a mighty tough job."

"Like King David of old, I'd rather fall into the hands of God than into those of man," Adrian returned, with rather rueful humor.

"Is one so very sure they are the hands of the Almighty? Too often one has reason to suspect they belong to exactly the opposite person—the inspirer—namely, of so many of your friend M. René Dax's unpardonable caricatures. But there," she added, "I don't want to give place to prejudice; though whether Modernity is veritably the highroad to the state of human earthly felicity its exponents so confidently—and truculently—predict, or not rather to some appalling and final catastrophe, some Armageddon, and Twilight of the Gods, appears to me, in the existing stage of its evolution, open to the liveliest question. Fortunately, at my time of life one is free to stand aside and look on, passively awaiting the event without taking part in the production of it. But with Madame St. Leger, as with yourself, it is different. You are on the active list. Whether you like or not, you are bound to participate in the production of the event—and she, at least, is by no means unwilling to do so."

"But how, chère Mademoiselle, but how?" Adrian questioned.

"After a fashion you can hardly be expected to indorse enthusiastically."

Miss Beauchamp shaded her eyes with her left hand again, while the many bracelets slipping up her thin wrist clinked and rattled.

"See here, my dear Savage," she said, "among all the destructions and reconstructions, the changes—many of them nominal rather than real, and, consequently, superfluous—of which Modernity is made up, one change is very real and has, I sincerely believe, come to stay. I mean the widespread change in thought and attitude of my sex toward yours."

"Feminism, in short."

"In short, Feminism."

A little silence followed. Then: "You take the dose very nicely," Anastasia said.

"Perhaps I take it so nicely because I am convinced it is innocuous. On the other hand, perhaps I don't take it at all. Really, I am not certain which."

He shifted his position, planting his elbows on his knees and his chin in the hollow of his hands.

"The deuce, the deuce!" he said, softly, tapping one long-toed boot meditatively upon the floor.

Miss Beauchamp watched him, amused, observant, making no comment.

"I am sorry," he went on, presently. "It's all moonshine, of course. Nature's too strong for them. In the end they must come into line."

"Moonshine has often proved a very dangerous, because so very intangible an enemy. And the end promises to be far off."

"Yes, I am sorry," Adrian repeated, "very sorry, we were over in England I could understand. Women there have an excuse for revolt. All Englishmen are pedants, even in their games, even in their sport. They have been called a nation of shopkeepers. They might with equal truth be called a nation of schoolmasters; not because they desire to impart knowledge, but because they crave to exercise power and prove, to themselves, their innate superiority by the chastisement of others. Ah! I have witnessed plenty of that in the last month! Truly, they are very disagreeable sons, husbands, and fathers, those middle-class Britons, the schoolmaster, so to speak, permanently on top. And there are not even enough of them to go round! Numerically they are inferior; and this helps to feed their arrogance and inflame their conceit. But even if there were enough, they wouldn't—if I may so express myself—go round. On the contrary, they would go in the opposite direction, to their own selfish pleasures, their clubs, their playing-fields, their interminable football, and cricket, and golf."

"Hum—hum! What about the British flag you waved so vigorously five minutes ago?"

"Did I? Forget it, then. It was a passing aberration. I repent and wrap myself once more in the folds of the tricolor. Most distinctly that is the flag under which a lover of your adorable sex should fight!"

"With the Gallic cock set symbolic at the top of the flag-staff?"

"And why not? Why not? Who can do otherwise than behold with approval that smart, well-groomed, abundantly amatory, I grant you, but also abundantly chivalrous fowl? His absence is, in a sense, precisely that with which I quarrel on the other side of the Channel. It goes to make the revolt of the Englishwoman comprehensible. Her countrymen's relation to her is so inartistic, so utilitarian, so without delicate humor. We hear of her freedom from annoyance, her personal security. But in what do these take their rise? Simply in her countrymen's indifference to her—to her emotions, her mentality, her thousand and one delicate needs, elusive and charming necessities. If he thinks about her at all, it is with the schoolmaster's odious design of correcting her faults, of improving her. The blatant conceit of the animal! As if she could be improved, as if she were not perfect already! But stay. There I pause to correct myself. The Englishwoman is susceptible of improvement. And how? By being snubbed, depressed, depreciated, grumbled at, scolded, made to think meanly of herself? Never a bit.—She has suffered generations of that treatment already. By being admired, reverenced, playfully delighted in, appreciated, encouraged."

Adrian spread abroad his hands with the most amiably persuasive expression and gesture.

"Ah! believe me, dear friend," he cried, "when Luther, the burly renegade German monk; Calvin, the parchment-dry, middle-class Picard lawyer, and English 'King Hal,' of grossest memory, conspired to depose Our Blessed Lady from her rightful throne in heaven, they, incidentally, went far to depose woman from her rightful throne here upon earth. So that, small wonder, having no eternal, universal Mother, whose aid and patronage she can invoke in hours of perplexity and distress, the modern, non-Catholic woman is constrained to rush around in prison-vans, or any other unlovely public vehicle which may come handy, invoking the aid of parliamentary suffrage and kindred dreary mechanical forms of protection against the tedious tyrannies of arrogant, sullen, selfish, slow-witted, birch-rod-wielding, pedagogic man. Yes, truly, as over there, I understand, I sympathize. But here, where, though we may have tolerated, even invented, Revolution, we have at least withstood that most time-serving and inartistic compromise, Reformation—with an impudent capital letter—here, in the patrimony of Chantecler, enveloped in the folds of the gallant tricolor, surely such revolt is unreasonable, is out of place! For here are we not all Feminists, every man-jack of us? Chère Mademoiselle, you know that we are. What more, then, have the members of your adored sex to ask?"

And, for the moment, Anastasia Beauchamp's usually ready tongue played her false. The whirl of words had been somewhat overpowering, while, through the whirl, his good faith was so transparently apparent, his argument suggested rather than aggressively pressed home, so evidently to himself conclusive, that a cogent answer was far from easy to frame.

"What more have they to ask?" she said, presently, smiling at him. "Well, just those alluring, because new, untried and intangible satisfactions which the Spirit of the Age promises so largely, and which you, my dear Savage, if you'll pardon my saying, don't and can't promise at all."