gonal table under the window. There were bookshelves of
workmanship patently feminine in their facile decoration and
structural instability, and on them an array of glittering poets,
Shelley, Rossetti, Keats, Browning, and odd volumes of Ruskin, South
Place Sermons, Socialistic publications in torn paper covers, and
above, science text-books and note-books in an oppressive
abundance. The autotypes that hung about the room were eloquent of
aesthetic ambitions and of a certain impermeability to implicit
meanings. There were the Mirror of Venus by Burne Jones, Rossetti's
Annunciation, Lippi's Annunciation, and the Love of Life and Love and
Death of Watts. And among other photographs was one of last year's
Debating Society Committee, Lewisham smiling a little weakly near the
centre, and Miss Heydinger out of focus in the right wing. And Miss
Heydinger sat with her back to all these things, in her black
horse-hair arm-chair, staring into the fire, her eyes hot, and her
chin on her hand.

"I might have guessed--before," she said. "Ever since that
_seance_. It has been different ..."

She smiled bitterly. "Some shop girl ..."

She mused. "They are all alike, I suppose. They come back--a little
damaged, as the woman says in 'Lady Windermere's Fan.' Perhaps he
will. I wonder ..."

"Why should he be so deceitful? Why should he act to me ...?"

"Pretty, pretty, pretty--that is our business. What man hesitates in
the choice? He goes his own way, thinks his own thoughts, does his own
work ...

"His dissection is getting behind--one can see he takes scarcely any
notes...."

For a long time she was silent. Her face became more intent. She began
to bite her thumb, at first slowly, then faster. She broke out at last
into words again.

"The things he might do, the great things he might do. He is able, he
is dogged, he is strong. And then comes a pretty face! Oh God! _Why_
was I made with heart and brain?" She sprang to her feet, with her
hands clenched and her face contorted. But she shed no tears.

Her attitude fell limp in a moment. One hand dropped by her side, the
other rested on a fossil on the mantel-shelf, and she stared down into
the red fire.

"To think of all we might have done! It maddens me!

"To work, and think, and learn. To hope and wait. To despise the
petty arts of womanliness, to trust to the sanity of man....

"To awake like the foolish virgins," she said, "and find the hour of
life is past!"

Her fa