the rift of the valley.
"I'll get you a chair," she said, rising. At her side a door opened into a
dim room. "No, no," he protested, "let me--in here?"

He entered the room. It was, he divined, hers. His foot struck against a
chair, and his hand caught the back. A thin, clinging under-garment rested
on it, which he deposited on a vague bed. It stuck to his fingers like a
cobweb. There was just room on the balcony to arrange the chairs side by
side.

VI

The spring night was potent, warm and damp; it was filled with intangible
influences which troubled the mind and stirred the memory to vain,
melancholy groping. Meta Beggs was so close to Gordon that their shoulders
touched. He rolled a cigarette and lit it, resting his arms upon the
railing. Her face was white in the gloom; not white as Lettice's had been,
like a flower, but sharply cut like marble; her nose was finely modelled,
her lips were delicately curved, but thin, compressed. He could
distinguish over her the paramount air of dissatisfaction.

She aroused in him unbidden thoughts; without the slightest freedom of
gesture or words she gave the impression of careless license. He grew
instinctively, at once, familiar, confidential, in his attitude toward
her. And she responded in the same manner; she did not draw back when
their arms accidentally met.

An interest, a vivacity of manner, such as Gordon had not experienced for
weeks stirred in him. Meta Beggs called back into being the old freedom of
stage-driving days, of the younger years. Her manner flattered his sex
vanity. They progressed famously.

"You don't like the children any better than you did?"

"They get more like rats every year."

"I thought about you, held against your will."

"Don't tell lies; I went right out of your mind."

"Not as quick as I went out of yours. I did think about you, though--" he
stopped, but she insisted upon his finishing the remark. "Well, I
remembered what you said about your shoulders, and I saw you that night at
your window...."

"Men, somehow, are always curious about me," she remarked indifferently;
"they have bothered me ever since I was a girl. I make them mad. I never
worry about such things myself--from the way women talk, and men go on,
there must be something left out of me ... it just seems silly to get all
red in the face--"

He almost constructed her words into a challenge. Five years ago, he
continued, or only two, he would have changed her