n she allowed herself to be kissed, which was, indeed,
inevitable. Finally she turned them over and over in her hands; and he
began to be puzzled by her.

"They are much too good for me. I don't know whether you ought to give
me such precious things. I am dreadfully careless and forgetful. Mamma
always says so."

"I shall want you to wear them so often that you won't have a chance of
forgetting them," he said gaily.

"Will you? Will you want me to wear them so often?" she asked, in an odd
voice. "Anyway, I should like to have just these, and nothing else. I am
glad that we know nobody, and have no friends, and that I shall have so
few presents. You won't give me many jewels, will you?" she said
suddenly, insistently, turning to him. "I shouldn't know what to do with
them. I used to have a magpie's wish for them; and now--I don't know,
but they don't give me pleasure. Not these, of course--not these!" she
added hurriedly, taking them up and beginning to fasten the bracelets on
her wrists.

Aldous looked perplexed.

"My darling!" he said, half laughing, and in the tone of the apologist,
"You know we _have_ such a lot of things. And I am afraid my grandfather
will want to give them all to you. Need one think so much about it? It
isn't as though they had to be bought fresh. They go with pretty gowns,
don't they, and other people like to see them?"

"No, but it's what they imply--the wealth--the _having_ so much while
other people want so much. Things begin to oppress me so!" she broke
out, instinctively moving away from him that she might express herself
with more energy. "I like luxuries so desperately, and when I get them I
seem to myself now the vulgarest creature alive, who has no right to an
opinion or an enthusiasm, or anything else worth having. You must not
let me like them--you must help me not to care about them!"

Raeburn's eye as he looked at her was tenderness itself. He could of
course neither mock her, nor put what she said aside. This question she
had raised, this most thorny of all the personal questions of the
present--the ethical relation of the individual to the World's Fair and
its vanities--was, as it happened, a question far more sternly and
robustly real to him than it was to her. Every word in his few
sentences, as they stood talking by the fire, bore on it for a practised
ear the signs of a long wrestle of the heart.

But to Marcella it sounded tame; her ear was haunted by the fragments of