still a little chill with the fright
he gave her, but under that it is beautifully secure.

"Well, you don't. And, oh Lord, why couldn't it have happened before I
went to France!--because then it would have been all different and I'd
have had some sort of a right--not a right, maybe--but anyhow, I could
have come to you--straight. I can't now, dear, that's all."

The voice halts as if something were breaking to pieces inside of it.

"I can't bring you what you'd bring me. Oh, it isn't
anything--physically--dangerous--that way--I--was--lucky." The words
space themselves as slowly as if each one of them burnt like acid as
it came. "It's--just--that. Just that--while I was in France--I went
over--all the hurdles--and then a few more, I guess--and I've got
to--tell you about it--because I love you--and because I wouldn't dare
love you, even--if I didn't--tell you the truth. You see. But, oh my
God, I never thought it would--hurt so!" and the parti-colored body of
the harlequin is shaken with a painful passion that seems ridiculously
out of keeping with his motley. But all that the young Chinese lady
feels is that for a single and brittle instant she and somebody else
had a star in their hands that covered them with light clean silver, and
that now the conjuror who made the star out of nothing and gave it to
her is showing her just why there never was any star. Moreover, she has
only known she was in love for the last five minutes--and that is hardly
long enough for her to discover that love itself is too living to be
very much like any nice girl's dreams of it--and the shock of what Ted
has said has brought every one of her mother's reticent acid hints on
the general uncleanliness of Man too prickling-close to her mind. And
she can't understand--she never will understand, she thinks with dull
pain.

"Oh how _could_ you, Ted? How _could_ you?" she says as he waits as a
man walking the plank might wait for the final gentle push that will
send him overboard.

"Oh, I know it was fine of you to tell me--but it's just spoiled
everything forever. Oh, Ted, how _could_ you?" and then she is
half-running, half-walking, up the path toward the porch and all she
knows is that she must get somewhere where she can be by herself. The
harlequin does not follow her.

XXXII

Oliver, in the middle of a painfully vivid dream in which he has just
received in the lounge of a Yale Club crowded with whispering, pointing
spectators t