might have treated his own child?"

But Maxine was not dealing in psychological subtleties.

"Love!" she cried out. "Love! All the world is in a conspiracy over this
love!"

"Because love is the only real thing, madame."

"Perhaps! But not the love of which you speak. The love of the soul, but
not the love of the body!"

"Madame, can one truly give the soul and refuse the body? Is not the
instinct of love to give all?"

The little Jacqueline spoke her truth with a frail confidence very
touching to behold. She was a child of the people, her sole weapons
against the world were a certain blonde beauty, a certain engaging
youthfulness; but she looked Maxine steadfastly in the eyes, meeting
the anger, the scorn, the fear compassed in her glance.

"I know the world, madame; it is not a pretty place. When I was sixteen
years old, I left my parents because it called to me--and in the
distance its voice was pleasant. I left my home; I had lovers." She
shrugged her shoulders with an extreme philosophy. "I tried
everything--except love. Then--I met Lucien!" Her philosophy merged
curiously to innocence, almost to the soft innocence of a child. "I ran
away again, madame; I fled to Lize." She paused. "Poor Lize! She has a
good heart! That was the night at the Bal Tabarin. That night Lucien
opened his arms, and I flung myself into them."

She spoke with perfect artlessness, ignorant of a world other than her
own, innocent of a moral code other than that which she followed.

Once again, as on the day she had first visited the _appartement_ and
made acquaintance with the old painter and his wife, dread of some
mysterious force filled Maxine. What marvellous power was this that
could smile secure at poverty and oblivion--that could cast a halo of
true emotion over a Bal Tabarin?

"It is not true!" she cried out, in answer to herself.

"Not true, madame? Why did I choose Lucien, who is nothing to look
upon--who is an artist and penniless?"

She ran across to Maxine; she caught her by the shoulders.

"Oh, madame! How beautiful you are--and how blind! You bandage your
eyes, and you tighten the knot. Oh, my God, if I could but open it for
you!"

"And reduce me to kisses and folly and tears?"

"One may drift into heaven on a kiss!" Jacqueline's voice was like some
precious metal, molten and warm.

"Or one may slip into hell! Do you think I have not known what it is to
kiss? It was from a kiss I fled to-night."

Her tone