aned.

"Sorry," said Stephen, "but I honestly want to hear all about it. Come
on, Tribe!"

Incandescent Gerald rose, half dazed. He believed in his Inner Light,
whatever Denis might have to say against it, and he could hardly resist
Stephen's gratifying suggestion. He smiled guilelessly into the young
man's face, and he, Stephen, and Mrs. Tribe vanished into the darkness.

"Stephen was a lout to go and do that!" Guy exclaimed.

"I think he noticed that Mrs. Tribe was beginning to cry," said Vanessa.

"Nonsense, Nessy, you must be dreaming!" retorted Denis.

CHAPTER XI

In the full-grown schoolgirl, who stands on the threshold of womanhood,
we have a creature who, though probably admirably equipped with normal
or even supernormal passions, is, possibly owing to the accident of her
age and her position, less prone to be led by passion than by vanity in
her first affairs with the other sex.

Standing on the threshold of life as she does, she may be a little too
eager to prove that she is fit for the game, fit for the thrills and
throbs of the great melodrama. Out of sheer anxiety therefore, without
any genuine desire to gratify a passion, but simply with the view of
giving her self-esteem the proof that she is mature, she may behave very
much as if her heart and passions were involved. And though, in later
life, she may develop into a supremely desirable woman, she behaves for
the nonce very much like those deplorable people who in all they think
and do are actuated by vanity alone.

The dupe in such cases, the fool in such cases, the creature who, owing
to his gross misunderstanding of the situation, allows himself to be
persuaded by his vanity that he has stimulated _une grande passion_ in
an unbroken filly, naturally deserves all he gets. Unfortunately, as the
world is at present constituted, his punishment, like that of the modern
co-respondent, always falls short of its proper severity.

Now Denis Malster was certainly no fool,--nay, he was probably above the
average in intelligence; and yet the speed with which he had succeeded
in monopolising Leonetta's attention made him feel in his gratified
vanity, so immensely grateful to the girl, that willy-nilly, he found
himself drifting all too pleasantly along that warm and intoxicating
stream that the nineteenth century called "Love," without feeling either
the obligation or even the desire to realise calmly and dispassionately
what had actually happene