ttle of her
speech.

"Ned will tell you what to do. He knows everybody. He's on the staff of
the Knickerbocker magazine, and he had a novel out last spring, 'The
Promotion of Fools,' that you must have seen advertised everywhere, like
a medicine."

"Yes, I've read that book."

"You must tell him if you liked it--they all care to hear that--and
he'll see that you meet men of your own kind." For looking at her he had
been able to give her words little attention. She had revealed herself
anew in the dull white of a gown that brought out the elusive glow of
her face. Her eyes were deep wells, shaded but luminous, under the
lusterless dark of her hair, and her smile flashed a girlish benignity
upon him. Acutely alive was he to the line of neck and shoulder and
arm, a slender, supple neck, set on shoulders superbly but lightly
modeled, the small collarbone exquisitely muffled but not lost, and the
little hollow at the base of her throat prettily definite. And all was
white and lusterless save the warning dusk of her eyes and the flash
from her parting lips.

With such cold passion for line did his artist's eye wreak its joy upon
her that, as she talked, she found herself thinking him curiously dull
to the prospect she opened. It was the impersonal look she had come to
know; and his replies were languid, as if he thought of other matters.
It might have passed for the bored ease of a man of the world had she
not known him to be amid novel surroundings.

Feeling a slight discomfort under his look, she at length diverted his
eyes to the room in which they sat.

"It's the room I like best in all the house," she said. "That big
drawing room you came through is inhuman. It terrified me as a child,
and still refuses to make friends with me, but this library--don't you
feel that I've humanized it?"

He became aware that he had felt its easing charm of dark-toned wood and
dull-red walls. There were low book-shelves, low seats that invited, a
broad table with its array of magazines, and a lazy fire in the open
grate.

"It's a fine room to be in," he said, bringing his eyes back to her.

"There's not a chair in it," she continued, "that wasn't meant to be sat
in--most chairs nowadays are mere spectacles, you know--and no glass
doors before the books. Nothing enrages me like having to open a door
to get at books."

"It's the room you need," he replied. "You draw all the light to
yourself. It gives you color, turns your hair