s taught me a number of things in the last two years. I am
grateful to her. Next season she is bringing a daughter out--and she has
a wonderful sense of the fitness of things." Then he sipped his tea and
got up and strolled towards the windows.

"Besides," he continued, "I do not admit there are any ties to be
contracted. The Greeks understood the place of women; all this nonsense
of vows of fidelity and exaltation of sentiment in the home cramps a
man's ambitions. It is perfectly natural that he should take a wife if
his position calls for it, because the society in which we move has made
a figurehead of that kind necessary. But that a woman should expect a
man to be faithful to her, be she wife or mistress, is contrary to all
nature."

"We have put nature out of the running now for a couple of thousand
years," Mr. Carlyon announced sententiously; "we have set up a standard
of impossibilities and worship hypocrisy and can no longer see any
truth. You have got to reckon with things as they are, not with what
nature meant them to be."

"Then you think women are a force now which one must consider?"

"I think they are as deadly as the deep sea--" and Mr. Carlyon's voice
was tense. "When they have only bodies they are dangerous enough, but
when--as many of the modern ones have--they combine a modicum of mind as
well, with all the cunning Satan originally endowed them with--then
happy is the man who escapes, even partially whole, from their claws."

"Whew--" whistled John Derringham, "and what if they have souls? Not
that I personally admit that such a case exists--what then?"

"When you meet a woman with a soul you will have met your match, John,"
the Professor said, and opening his _Times_, which Demetrius had brought
in with the second post, he closed the conversation.

John Derringham strolled into the garden. The place had been greatly
improved since Halcyone's first discovery of its new occupant. The
shutters were all a spruce green and the paths weeded and tidy, while
the borders were full of bedded-out plants and flowers. A famous
gardener from Upminster renowned through all the West had come over and
given his personal attention to the matter, and next year wonderful
herbaceous borders would spring up on all sides. Mr. Johnson's visits
and his council, though at first resented, had at length grown a source
of pure delight to Halcyone; she reveled in the blooms of the delicate
begonias and salvias and other b