e behind him in what he said--that was all. He might have
told her that women were only the chattels of men, born to slavery,
the property of their masters, and she would not have denied it to
him.

"What in the name of God are women?" he had said more than once in
his life--"Is one of them ever worth all the while?" And he thought
he had meant it. To a great extent, he acted up to it as well. These
are the questions that men of the type put to themselves over and
over again--but there are Cleopatras to mate with Antonys, Helens
of Troy and Lady Hamiltons who can snap their fingers in the face
of such odds and win. But Sally was not of this blood. She is the
lamb that goes willing to the slaughter, the woman, whom a man like
Traill, when once he holds the trembling threads of her affection,
can drive to the uttermost.

"Then you give no liberty to a woman?" she said.

"No--not the liberty she talks about. Not the idea of liberty that
she gets from these suffragist pamphleteers."

"I'd like you to meet my friend, Miss Hallard," said Sally.

"Why? Who's Miss Hallard? What is she?"

"She's an artist--I share rooms with her."

"Why would you like me to meet her?"

"I'd like to hear you two argue. She thinks just the opposite. She
thinks--"

"I never argue with a woman," Traill interrupted.

"You think so poorly of us?" She tried to say it with spirit--struck
the flint in her eyes, contracted her lips to the hard, thin line.

"As women? No--the very best." Her looks did not worry him. Water
pouring over marble runs off as smoothly. "You want to be judged as
men--you never will be till you can cut your hair short and dress
the part. Clothes have the deuce of a lot to do with it. I can love
a woman, but, my God, I can't argue with her."

He leant back to let Berthe put the plates of soup before them, and
Sally watched his face. It was very hard--high cheek-bones from which
the flesh drooped in hollows to the jaws, the grey eyes well set,
neither deep nor prominent, but flinching at nothing. There was no
great show of intellectuality in the forehead--it was broad, smooth,
but not high; yet none of the features were small. The jaw was square,
the upper lip long. At one end the mouth seemed to bend upwards in
a twist of irony, rather than humour, and the lips themselves were
thin--lips that could cut each word to a point if they chose, before
they uttered it, a mouth by no means sensitive to the hard things
it cou