thout it. Haven't you felt you couldn't do without her?
That you'd die if you didn't get her; work, and do somebody else in the
eye for her? Haven't you?"

"That lets me out," he said soberly, lighting a fresh cigarette. "I'm
not guilty."

There was a brief silence. Mr. Spokesly was puzzled. He could not fit
this experience in with one of the two cardinal points in an
Englishman's creed, the belief that no English girl can really love a
foreigner. The other, of course, is that no foreign girl is really
virtuous.

"That's a nice thing to say!" she retorted, trembling a little with her
emotions. "If that's the new way they have at home----"

"Oh, I don't know," he began and he looked at her. "I'm afraid you're
getting all upset. I'm sorry, really, I didn't think you'd have been so
serious about it. As if it mattered to you!"

"I'm thinking of _her_," she said with a little hysterical sob. "You
mustn't----"

Mr. Spokesly was in a quandary again. If he put Ada's adoration in its
true perspective, he would not think very highly of himself. He took no
real pleasure in speaking of himself as a promised man even to a married
woman. Yet how was he to get this particular married woman in delicate
health and extremely robust emotions to see him as a human being and not
a monster of cold-blooded caution? And there was another problem. What
of this new and astonishing revelation--new and astonishing to him, at
any rate--that love, to a woman, is not a mere decoction of bliss
administered by a powerful and benevolent male, but a highly complicated
universe of subjective illusions in which the lover is only dimly seen
as a necessary but disturbing phantom of gross and agonizing
ineptitudes? The wonder, however, is not that Mr. Spokesly was slow to
discover this, but that he did not live and die, as many men do, without
even suspecting it. He nodded his head slightly as he replied:

"You're right in a way," he muttered. "She thinks I'm--well, she thinks
I'm brave to go to sea in war-time!" The extreme incongruity of such an
hallucination made him giggle.

"She would! You are!" said the woman on the couch, almost irritably.
"What do you want to laugh for? Don't you see what you miss?" she added
in illogical annoyance.

"That the way you feel about Mr. Dainopoulos?" Mr. Spokesly asked. The
woman turned her face so that the lamplight illumined her coiled hair
and for a moment she did not reply. Then she said, her face still in