for several
years; in fact, not until after my husband's death, when I returned there
to live. But by that time I had lost both youth and beauty. His wife
had died, but left him an heir, and he showed no disposition to marry
again; certainly he was as indifferent to me as I to him. We often met,
and as he respected my mind and my knowledge of European affairs, we
talked politics together, and he sometimes asked my advice.

"But to go back. After that was over I determined to put love definitely
out of my life. I believed then and finally that I had not the gift of
inspiring love; nor would I ever risk humiliation and suffering again. I
played the great game of life and politics. I was still beautiful--for a
few years--I had an increasingly great position, all the advantages,
obvious and subtle, that money could procure. My maid was very clever.
My gowns, as time went on, were of a magnificent simplicity; all
frou-frous were renounced. I had no mind to invite the valuation I heard
applied to certain American women in Paris: 'elderly and dressy.'"

Clavering laughed for the first time. "I wonder you ever made a mistake
of any sort. I also wonder if you are a type as well as an individual?
I have, I think, followed intelligently your psychological involutions
and convolutions so far. I am only hoping you will not get beyond my
depth. What was your attitude toward your past mistakes--beyond what you
have told me? Did you suffer remorse, as I am told women do when they
either voluntarily renounce or are permitted to sin no more?"

"I neither regarded them as mistakes nor did I suffer remorse. Every
human being makes what are called mistakes and those happened to be mine.
Therefore I dismissed them to the limbo of the inevitable. . . . As your
world, I am told, looks upon you as the coming dramatist, it may appeal
to your imagination to visualize that secret and vital and dramatic
undercurrent of what was on the surface a proud and splendid life. . . .
Or, if there are regrets, it is for the weight of memories, the
completeness of disillusion, the slaying of mental youth--which cannot
survive brutal facts.

"I think that for women of my type--what may be called the intellectual
siren--the lover phase is inevitable. We are goaded not only by the
imperious demands of womanhood and the hope of the perfect companion, but
by curiosity, love of adventure, ennui; possibly some more obscure
complex--vengeance on t