ubt could
fall honestly and romantically in love today. In fact, they appeared to
be demonstrating the possibility, with the eternal ingenuousness of the
male. And yet nature had played them this scurvy trick. The young heart
in the old shell. Grown-up boys with a foot in the grave. Dependent
upon mind and address alone to win a woman's regard, while the woman
dreamed of the man with a thick thatch over his brains and the responsive
magnetism of her own years. Poor old fighting-cocks! What a jade nature
was . . . or was it merely the tyranny of an Idea, carefully inculcated
at the nativity of the social group, with other arbitrary laws, in behalf
of the race? The fetish of the body. Stark materialism. . . . However,
it was not as hard on them as on women outgrown their primary function.
Theirs at least the privilege of approach; and their deathless masculine
conceit--when all was said, Nature's supreme gift of compensation--never
faltered.

It crossed Clavering's mind that she was experimenting on her own
account, not merely bewildering and enthralling these estimable gentlemen
of her mother's generation. But why? Joining casually in the
conversation, or quite withdrawn, he watched her with increasing and now
quite impersonal interest. He almost fancied she was making an effort to
be something more than the polite and amiable hostess, that she was
deliberately striving to see them as men who had a perfect right to
fascinate a woman of her age and loveliness. Well, it had happened
before. Elderly men of charm and character had won and kept women fully
thirty years their junior. Possibly she belonged to that distinguished
minority who refused to be enslaved by the Ancient Idea, that iron code
devised by fore-thinking men when Earth was young and scantily
peopled. . . . Still--why this curious eagerness, this--it was
indecipherable . . . no doubt his lively imagination was playing him
tricks. Probably she was merely sympathetic. . . . And then, toward the
end of the dinner, her manner changed, although too subtly for any but
the detached observer to notice it. To Clavering she seemed to go dead
under her still animated face. He saw her eyes wander from Dinwiddie's
bald head to Osborne's flattened cheek . . . her lip curled, a look of
fierce contempt flashed in her eyes before she hastily lowered the
lids. . . . He fancied she was glad to rise from the table.

X

"Well?" he asked, as he and Di