s obliged to
admit that there was a great deal of good sense in what she had to say
about David, whom she had met once or twice at the Cords'. Ben was too
candid and eager not to ask her before long the question that was
in his mind--how it was possible for a woman holding her views to be
leading a life so opposed to them.

She was not at all offended, and even less at a loss for an answer.
"I am not a free agent, Mr. Moreton," she said. "Unhappily, before I
began to think at all, I had undertaken certain obligations. The law
allows a woman to dispose of everything but her property while she is
still a child. I married at eighteen."

It was a story not without interest and Mrs. Dawson told it well.
There does not live a man who would not have been interested.

They dined, not in the great dining room downstairs, nor even in the
painted room from Sienna, but in a sort of loggia that opened from it,
where, beyond the shaded lights, Ben could watch the moon rise out of
the sea.

It was a perfect little meal, short, delicious, and quickly served
by three servants. He enjoyed it thoroughly, although he found his
hostess a strangely confusing companion. He would make up his mind
that she was a sincere soul captured by her environment, when a
freshly discovered jewel on her long fingers would shake his faith.
And he would just decide that she was a melodramatic fraud, when she
would surprise him by her scholarly knowledge of social problems. She
had read deeply, knew several languages, and had known many of the
European leaders. Such phrases as "Jaures wrote me ten days before he
died--" were frequent, but not too frequent, on her lips.

By the time Crystal stopped for him Ben had begun to feel like a child
who has lost his mother in a museum, or as Dante might have felt if he
had missed Virgil from his side. When he bade Mrs. Dawson good night,
she asked him to come back.

"Come and spend September here," she said, as if it were a small
thing. "You can work all day if you like. I sha'n't disturb you, and
you need never see a soul. It will do you good."

He was touched by the invitation, but of course he refused it. He
tried to explain tactfully, but clearly, why it was that he couldn't
do that sort of thing--that the editor of _Liberty_ did not take his
holiday at Newport.

She understood, and sighed. "Ah, yes," she said. "I'm like that man in
mythology whom neither the sky nor the earth would receive. I'm very
lon