depths. To Bienville himself, during these idle, balmy
nights, there was a threefold inspiration, which in no case called for
strict exactitude of detail. There was, first, the pleasure of talking
about himself; there was, next, the desire to give his career the
advantage of a romantic light; and there was, thirdly, the
story-teller's natural instinct to hold his hearer spellbound. The little
more or the little less could not matter to a man whom he didn't know, in
talking about a woman whose name he hadn't given; while, on the other
hand, there was the satisfaction, to which the Latin is so sensitive, of
showing himself a lion among ladies.

Moreover, he had boasted of his achievements so often that he had come
to believe in them long before giving Derek the detailed account of his
victory on the gleaming Caribbean seas. On his part, Derek had found no
difficulty in crediting that which was related with apparent fidelity to
fact, and which filled up, in so remarkable a manner, the empty spaces
between the mysterious, broken hints Diane had at various times given
him of her own inner life. The one story helped to tell the other as
accurately as the fragments of an ancient stele, when put together, make
up the whole inscription. The very independence of the sources from
which he drew his knowledge negatived the possibility of doubt. There
was but one way in which Diane could have put herself right with him:
she could have swept the charge aside, with a serene contemptuousness of
denial. Had she done so, her assertion would have found his own
eagerness to believe in her ready to meet it half-way. As it was, alas!
her admissions had been damning. Where she acknowledged the smoke, there
surely must have been the fire! Where she owned to so much culpability,
there surely must have been the entire measure of guilt!

For the time being, he forgot Bienville, in order to review the
conversation of the last half-hour. Diane had not carried herself like a
woman who had nothing with which to reproach herself; and that a woman
should be obliged to reproach herself at all was a humiliation to her
womanhood. In the midst of this gross world, where the man's soul
naturally became stained and coarsened, hers should retain the celestial
beauty with which it came forth from God. That, in his opinion, was her
duty; that was her instinct; that was the object with which she had been
placed on earth. A woman who was no better than a man was a