Kitty grew superior. "Well, if that's to your taste, Hortense Rieppe!"

"It was none of it like Charley," murmured Hortense.

"I should think not! Charley's not crude. What do you see in that man?"

"I like the way his hair curls above his ears."

For this Kitty found nothing but an impatient exclamation.

And now the voice of Hortense sank still deeper in dreaminess,--down
to where the truth lay; and from those depths came the truth, flashing
upward through the drowsy words she spoke: "I think I want him for his
innocence."

What light these words may have brought to Kitty, I had no chance to
learn; for the voice of Gazza returning with the key put an end to this
conversation. But I doubted if Kitty had it in her to fathom the nature
of Hortense. Kitty was like a trim little clock that could tick tidily
on an ornate shelf; she could go, she could keep up with time, with
the rapid epoch to which she belonged, but she didn't really have many
works. I think she would have scoffed at that last languorous speech
as a piece of Hortense's nonsense, and that is why Hortense uttered it
aloud: she was safe from being understood. But in my ears it sounded
the note of revelation, the simple central secret of Hortense's fire,
a flame fed overmuch with experience, with sophistication, grown cold
under the ministrations of adroitness, and lighted now by the "crudity"
of John's love-making. And when, after an interval, I had rowed my
boat back, and got into the carriage, and started on my long drive from
Udolpho to Kings Port, I found that there was almost nothing about all
this which I did not know now. Hortense, like most riddles when you are
told the answer, was clear:--

"I think I want him for his innocence."

Yes; she was tired of love-making whose down had been rubbed off; she
hungered for love-making with the down still on, even if she must pay
for it with marriage. Who shall say if her enlightened and modern eye
could not look beyond such marriage (when it should grow monotonous) to
divorce?

XXI: Hortense's Cigarette Goes Out

John was the riddle that I could not read. Among my last actions of
this day was one that had been almost my earliest, and bedtime found me
staring at his letter, as I stood, half undressed, by my table. The calm
moon brought back Udolpho and what had been said there, as it now shone
down upon the garden where Hortense had danced. I stared at John's
letter as if its words were new t