age.

"Mademoiselle is but recently come out of the convent," said he. "She
has lived always in the provinces and has never had the honour of
tasting such admirable forms of dessert as Monsieur offers his
patrons."

The proprietor bowed; an extraordinary mixture of expressions played
over his countenance.

"That sees itself, Monsieur," he replied. "The affair is already
forgotten. I have summoned a closed carriage for Monsieur."

And thus it was that Roger found himself for the second time in a
carriage with Margarita Josephine Dolores, but with a great difference
in his attitude toward that young person. It is a fact possibly
curious but certainly undeniable, that when one receives a wine-glass
full in the face at the hands of an acquaintance, however recent, this
acquaintance is placed immediately upon terms of a certain intimacy
with one; the ice, at least, is broken. An unconscious conviction of
this coloured Roger's tone and shone in his eyes.

"You must never do such a thing as that, Margarita," he said, "that
was a terrible thing to do."

"It was a terrible thing that he did to me," replied Margarita
composedly.

"Nonsense," said Roger, "perfect nonsense! The man meant you no harm.
He brought you only what I had ordered for you."

"You! You told him to try to kill me?" cried this unbelievable
Margarita, and turning in her seat with the swiftness of a panther she
slapped him, a stinging, biting blow, flat across his cheek. A tornado
of answering rage whirled him out of himself and seizing her wrists,
he bent them behind her back.

If I seem to be unwarrantably acquainted with Roger's emotions at this
crisis, it is only because I understand them from experience, not
because he analysed them at length for me. I too have been in
conflict, real physical conflict, with Margarita. I too have felt that
old unpitying frenzy, that unreasonable delight in vanquishing her
furious strength. Something in Roger--I know how suddenly, how
amazingly--strained and snapped; the old bonds of civilisation (which
with the Anglo-Saxon has always been feminisation) burst and dropped
away, and the lust of physical ascendency caught him and swept the
pretty legends of moral control and chivalrous forbearing into the
dust bins and kitchen middens of nature's great domestic economy. What
was it in Margarita that drew that old, primitive passion, that
ancient world-stuff out of its decorous grave, all planted with
orchids and mai