u see I'm trying? Give me
time, Louis! Make allowances. You can't utterly change people in a few
hours."

He gazed at her intently for a moment.

"You mean that you are trying to be fair to--her?"

"I--if you call it that;--yes! But a family can not adapt itself,
instantaneously, to such a cataclysm as threatens--I mean--I mean--oh,
Louis! Try to understand us and sympathise a little with us!"

His arms closed around her shoulders:

"Little sister, we both have the family temper--and beneath it, the
family instinct for cohesion. If we are also selfish it is not
individual but family selfishness. It is the family which has always
said to the world, '_Noli me tangere_!' while we, individually, are
really inclined to be kinder, more sympathetic, more curious about the
neighbours outside our gate. Let it be so now. Once inside the family,
what can harm Valerie?"

"Dearest, dearest brother," she murmured, "you talk like a foolish man.
Women understand better. And if it is a part of your program that this
girl is to be accepted by an old-fashioned society, now almost obsolete,
but in which this family is merely a single superannuated unit, that
program can never be carried out."

"I think you are mistaken," he said.

"I know I am not. It is inevitable that if you marry this girl she will
be more or less ignored, isolated, humiliated, overlooked outside our
own little family circle. Even in that limited mob which the newspapers
call New York Society--in that modern, wealthy, hard-witted,
over-jewelled, self-sufficient league which is yet too eternally
uncertain of its own status to assume any authority or any
responsibility for a stranger without credentials,--it would not be
possible to make Valerie West acceptable in the slightest sense of the
word. Because she is too well known; her beauty is celebrated; she has
become famous. Her only chance there--or with us--would have been in her
absolute anonymity. Then lies _might_ have done the rest. But lying is
now useless in regard to her."

"Perfectly," he said. "She would not permit it."

In his vacant gaze there was something changed--a fixedness born of a
slow and hopeless enlightenment.

"If that is the case, there is no chance," he said thoughtfully. "I had
not considered that aspect."

"I had."

He shook his head slightly, gazing through the window at the starry
lustre overhead.

"I wouldn't care," he said, "if she would only marry me. If she'd do
that I