_cabinet particulier_ almost drowned his
words. There was one woman's voice that was rasping and sustained with
an abandon of vulgarity released by the potency of champagne.

Elise Durwent looked across the table at her companion. 'Are you bored
with all my talk?' she said. 'You Americans aren't nearly so candid
about such things as Englishmen.'

'On the contrary, Miss Durwent, I am deeply interested. Only, I am a
little puzzled as to how you connect the usual functions of animals
with woman's place in the world.'

With an air of abstraction she drew some pattern on the table-cloth
with the prongs of a fork. 'I don't know,' she said dreamily, 'that I
can apply the argument correctly, 'but--Mr. Selwyn, when I was a child
playing about with my little brother "Boy-blue"--that was a pet name I
had for him--I was just as happy to be a girl as he was to be a boy. I
think that is true of all children. But ask any woman which she would
rather be, a man or a woman, and unless she is trying to make you fall
in love with her she will say the former. That is not as it should be,
but it's true. Yet, if we are part of your great plan working towards
the light, we're entitled to the same share in life as you--more, if
anything, because we perpetuate life and have more in common with all
that it holds than men have. There, that is a long speech for me.'

'Please don't stop.'

There was a howl in a man's voice from the noisy _cabinet particulier_,
followed by a laugh from the same woman as before, which set the teeth
on edge.

'That woman in there,' she went on, 'will partly show what I mean. In
the beginning we were both given certain qualities. She has lost her
modesty through disuse; I'm losing my womanliness and power of sympathy
for the same reason. She's more candid about it, that's all. When
Dick and I were youngsters I dreamed of life as Casim Baba's cave full
of undiscovered treasures that would be endless. Now I look back upon
those days as the only really happy ones I shall ever have.'

'You are--how old?'

'Twenty-three.'

'You will grow less cynical as you grow older,' he said, from the
altitude of twenty-six.

'I agree,' she said. 'As, unlike the Japanese, we haven't the moral
courage of suicide, I shall get used to the idea of being an
Englishman's wife; of living in a calm routine of sport, bridge,
week-ends, and small-talk--entertaining people who bore you, and in
turn helping to bore those