p up, you see. Understand me?'

"'Yes, doctor, I understand you,' she said, and walked out of the room
with her head high and her hips swinging. Something in her
carriage--so different from the way she used to slip in and out--struck
me all of a sudden, and there flashed into my mind an old story about
Althea's being the direct descendant of one of the oldest African kings
and a princess in her own right. Absurd, of course, but it makes a lot
of difference whether you regard those people as creeping up to our
democracy or sliding down from their royalty, you see. And with Mynie
the scale had shifted suddenly, and it was the last of an old line that
swung by me, not the first of a new one. Straight across the
commonplace air of my office a wind out of the jungle had blown, a
whiff of something old and unmanageable, and beyond rules, or beneath
'em, perhaps; something there wasn't any prescription for; something
not to be weighed and measured by any of the new methods, because it
antedated method.

"Yes, it was all that. I don't know if I make myself clear at all....
You may think I was working up a fanciful theory just because a pert
servant maid was getting a little wayward, but it wasn't only
that--Lord, no! It was a great deal more than that, and it was just
beginning; just beginning."

There was no doubt that he had the strained attention of all of them:
their hands held the glasses, but they did not drink, looking mostly at
the wet rings on the polished table, or the little heaps of white
ashes. A servant passing through scratched a match with a rasping
splutter, and they twitched angrily at the interruption, fearing it
would throw him off the track--he was so easily quieted, and when once
one of his great gulfs of silence received him, it was hopeless.

But this time he went on.

"After that the house got very still, by degrees. Althea sang less and
less and by and by not at all. There seemed to be no clatter, no
bustle, no homely, chattering machinery of life. Sometimes I would
step out through the dining-room and listen, purposely, to see where
they were. And it was always the same thing: Althea sitting in her
clean kitchen, by her clean table, with a bowl or a pan or what not in
her lap, her yellowish hands lax, her knees as still as marble, her
eyes set ahead of her, thinking, thinking, thinking. Her brows would
be knit and her face all drawn. She had the look of a fighter, a
struggler with