e discomfitures and dismays of the afternoon tended to resolve
themselves for Gregory into the memory of the final yielding. She had
let him take her into his arms, and with the joy was the added sweetness
of knowing that in permitting and reciprocating his unauthorized kiss
she sacrificed some principles, at all events, for his sake.

CHAPTER XII

Madame von Marwitz was sitting on the great terrace of a country-house
in Massachusetts, opening and reading her post, as we have already seen
her do. Impatient and weary as the occupation often made her, she yet
depended upon the morning waves of adulation that lapped in upon her
from every quarter of the earth. To miss the fullness of the tide gave
her, when by chance there was deficiency, the feeling that badly made
_cafe au lait_ gave her at the beginning of the day; something was
wrong; the expected stimulant lacked in force or in flavour, and coffee
that was not strong and sweet and aromatic was a mishap so unusual that,
when it occurred, it became an offence almost gross and unnatural, as
did a post that brought few letters of homage and appreciation. To-day
the mental coffee was as strong and as perfumed as that of which she had
shortly before partaken in her lovely little _Louis Quinze_ boudoir,
after she had come in from her bath. The bath-room was like that of a
Roman Empress, all white marble, with a square of emerald water into
which one descended down shallow marble steps. Madame von Marwitz was
amused by the complexities of luxury among which she found herself, some
of which, even to her, were novel. "_Eh, eh, ma chere_," she had said to
Miss Scrotton, "beautiful if you will, and very beautiful; but its nails
are too much polished, its hair too much _ondule_. I prefer a porcelain
to a marble bath-tub." But the ingenuities of hospitality which the
Aspreys--earnest and accomplished millionaires--lavished upon their
guests made one, she owned, balmily comfortable. And as she sat now in
her soft white draperies under a great silken sunshade, raised on a
stand above her and looking in the sunlight like a silver bell, the
beauty of her surroundings--the splendid Italian gardens, a miracle of
achievement even if lacking, as the miraculous may, an obvious relation
with its surroundings; the landscape with its inlaid lake and wood and
hill and great arch of bluest sky; the tall, transparent, Turneresque
trees in the middle distance;--all this stately serenity se