ourse in Greek literature. But she felt
what would probably have been unperceived by many a young lady who had
taken a first in classics: the ineluctable fatality of the tale, the
dread sway in it of the same mysterious "luck" which pulled the threads
of her own small destiny. It was not literature to her, it was fact: as
actual, as near by, as what was happening to her at the moment and what
the next hour held in store. Seen in this light, the play regained for
Darrow its supreme and poignant reality. He pierced to the heart of
its significance through all the artificial accretions with which his
theories of art and the conventions of the stage had clothed it, and saw
it as he had never seen it: as life.

After this there could be no question of flight, and he took her back to
the theatre, content to receive his own sensations through the medium of
hers. But with the continuation of the play, and the oppression of the
heavy air, his attention again began to wander, straying back over the
incidents of the morning.

He had been with Sophy Viner all day, and he was surprised to find
how quickly the time had gone. She had hardly attempted, as the hours
passed, to conceal her satisfaction on finding that no telegram came
from the Farlows. "They'll have written," she had simply said; and her
mind had at once flown on to the golden prospect of an afternoon at the
theatre. The intervening hours had been disposed of in a stroll through
the lively streets, and a repast, luxuriously lingered over, under
the chestnut-boughs of a restaurant in the Champs Elysees. Everything
entertained and interested her, and Darrow remarked, with an amused
detachment, that she was not insensible to the impression her charms
produced. Yet there was no hard edge of vanity in her sense of her
prettiness: she seemed simply to be aware of it as a note in the general
harmony, and to enjoy sounding the note as a singer enjoys singing.

After luncheon, as they sat over their coffee, she had again asked
an immense number of questions and delivered herself of a remarkable
variety of opinions. Her questions testified to a wholesome and
comprehensive human curiosity, and her comments showed, like her
face and her whole attitude, an odd mingling of precocious wisdom and
disarming ignorance. When she talked to him about "life"--the word was
often on her lips--she seemed to him like a child playing with a tiger's
cub; and he said to himself that some day the c