felt, far away, dim ... below.

* * * * *

The conviction fastened upon him that this chance realization would
determine, where women were concerned, the whole of his life. But that
space, he reminded himself, short at best, was, in him, to terminate
almost at once. All his philosophy of resistance, of strength, was
built upon the final dignity of a supreme giving. His thoughts went
back to Narcisa as he sat in La Clavel's room in the St. Louis,
watching a hairdresser skilfully build up the complicated edifice of
the dancer's hair. Soon, he grasped, it would be ready for the
camellia placed back of the lobe of an ear. A towel was pinned about
her naked shoulders, she had on a black fringed petticoat and dangling
slippers of red morocco leather. La Clavel was faced away from
Charles, but, in the mirror before which she sat, he could see her
features and vivid changing expressions.

The truth was that, close, he had found her disconcerting, almost
appalling. Climbing the long stairs at the message that she would
see him in her room, he had surrendered himself to the romantic
devotion which had overwhelmed the small select circle of his
intimates. This had nothing to do with the admirable sentiment of a
practical all-inclusive love; it was aesthetic rather than social. They
all worshipped La Clavel as a symbol of beauty, as fortunately
unattainable in a small immediate measure; and, bowing inside the
door of her chamber, he had been positively abashed at the strange
actuality of her charm.

La Clavel was at once more essentially feminine than any other woman
he had encountered and different from all the rest. A part of the
impression she created was the result of her pallor, the even
unnatural whiteness under the night of her hair. Her face was white,
but her lips--a carmine stick lay close at her hands--were brutally
red. She hurt him, struck savagely at the idealism of his image;
indeed, in the room permeated with a dry powdered scent, at the woman
redolent of vital flesh, he had been a little sickened. However, that
had gone; and he watched the supple hands in the crisp coarse mass of
her hair with a sense of adventure lingering faintly from his earlier
youth: he was, in very correct clothes, holding his hat and stick and
gloves, idling through the toilet of a celebrated dancer and beauty.

Or, rather, he saw himself objectively, as he had been say a year ago,
at which time his pre