om time to time, there showed
at the surface or vaguely outlined in the depths, forms strangely out of
place in those unsullied waters. But I either refused to see or refused to
trust my senses. I had a fixed ideal of what a woman should be; this girl
embodied that ideal.

"If you'd only give up your cigarettes," I remember saying to her when we
were a little better acquainted, "you'd be perfect."

She made an impatient gesture. "Don't!" she commanded almost angrily. "You
make me feel like a hypocrite. You tempt me to be a hypocrite. Why not be
content with woman as she is--a human being? And--how could I--any woman
not an idiot--be alive for twenty-five years without learning--a thing or
two? Why should any man want it?"

"Because to know is to be spattered and stained," said I. "I get enough of
people who know, down-town. Up-town--I want a change of air. Of course,
you think you know the world, but you haven't the remotest conception of
what it's really like. Sometimes when I'm with you, I begin to feel mean
and--and unclean. And the feeling grows on me until it's all I can do to
restrain myself from rushing away."

She looked at me critically.

"You've never had much to do with women, have you?" she finally said slowly
in a musing tone.

"I wish that were true--almost," replied I, on my mettle as a man, and
resisting not without effort the impulse to make some vague
"confessions"--boastings disguised as penitential admissions--after the
customary masculine fashion.

She smiled--and one of those disquieting shapes seemed to me to be floating
lazily and repellently downward, out of sight. "A man and a woman can be a
great deal to each other, I believe," said she; "can be--married, and all
that--and remain as strange to each other as if they had never met--more
hopelessly strangers."

"There's always a sort of mystery," I conceded. "I suppose that's one of
the things that keep married people interested."

She shrugged her shoulders--she was in evening dress, I recall, and there
was on her white skin that intense, transparent, bluish tinge one sees on
the new snow when the sun comes out.

"Mystery!" she said impatiently. "There's no mystery except what we
ourselves make. It's useless--perfectly useless," she went on absently.
"You're the sort of man who, if a woman cared for him, or even showed
friendship for him by being frank and human and natural with him, he'd
punish her for it by--by despising her."

I