ses of an obscure action authorizes a certain
latitude of behaviour. He had seen them together repeatedly, communing
openly or apart, and there was in their way of joining each other,
in their poses and their ways of separating, something special and
characteristic and pertaining to themselves only, as if they had been
made for each other.

What he couldn't understand was why Mrs. Travers should have put off his
natural curiosity as to her latest conference with the Man of Fate by
an incredible statement as to the nature of the conversation. Talk about
dresses, opera, people's names. He couldn't take this seriously. She
might have invented, he thought, something more plausible; or simply
have told him that this was not for him to know. She ought to have known
that he would not have been offended. Couldn't she have seen already
that he accepted the complexion of mystery in her relation to that man
completely, unquestionably; as though it had been something preordained
from the very beginning of things? But he was not annoyed with Mrs.
Travers. After all it might have been true. She would talk exactly as
she liked, and even incredibly, if it so pleased her, and make the man
hang on her lips. And likewise she was capable of making the man talk
about anything by a power of inspiration for reasons simple or perverse.
Opera! Dresses! Yes--about Shakespeare and the musical glasses! For a
mere whim or for the deepest purpose. Women worthy of the name were like
that. They were very wonderful. They rose to the occasion and sometimes
above the occasion when things were bound to occur that would be comic
or tragic (as it happened) but generally charged with trouble even to
innocent beholders. D'Alcacer thought these thoughts without bitterness
and even without irony. With his half-secret social reputation as a man
of one great passion in a world of mere intrigues he liked all women.
He liked them in their sentiment and in their hardness, in the tragic
character of their foolish or clever impulses, at which he looked with a
sort of tender seriousness.

He didn't take a favourable view of the position but he considered Mrs.
Travers' statement about operas and dresses as a warning to keep off the
subject. For this reason he remained silent through the meal.

When the bustle of clearing away the table was over he strolled toward
Mrs. Travers and remarked very quietly:

"I think that in keeping away from us this evening the Man of Fa