t amusing man you
know. You don't find me exciting."

"No." She turned it over. "No; I don't find you at all exciting
_or_ very amusing. How is it, then, that you don't bore me?"

"How can I say?"

"I think it is because you're so serious, because you take me
seriously."

"But I don't. Not for a moment. As for an immortality of
seriousness----"

"At least," she said, "you would admit that possibly I might have a
soul. At any rate, you behave as if you did."

He dodged it dexterously.

"That's where the immortality comes in, is it?"

"Of _course_," said Philippa.

V

She went on amusing Straker all evening, and after dinner she made
him take her into the conservatory.

The conservatory at Amberley is built out fanwise from the big west
drawing-room on to the southwest corner of the terrace; it is
furnished as a convenient lounge, and you sit there drinking coffee,
and smoking, and admiring Brocklebank's roses, which are the glory
of Amberley. And all among Brocklebank's roses they came upon
Furnival and Mrs. Viveash.

Among the roses she shimmered and flushed in a gown of rose and
silver. Among the roses she was lovely, sitting there with Furnival.
And Straker saw that Miss Tarrant was aware of the loveliness of
Mrs. Viveash, and that her instinct woke in her.

She advanced, trailing behind her the long, diaphanous web of her
black gown. When she was well within the range of Furnival's
sensations she paused to smell a rose, bending her body backward and
sideward so that she showed to perfection the deep curved lines
that swept from her shoulders to her breasts, and from her breasts
downward to her hips. A large diamond star hung as by an invisible
thread upon her neck: it pointed downward to the hollow of her
breasts. There was no beauty that she had that was not somehow
pointed to, insisted on, held forever under poor Furnival's excited
eyes.

But in a black gown, among roses, she showed disadvantageously her
dead whiteness and her morbid rose. She was aware of that. Mrs.
Viveash, glowing among the roses, had made her aware.

"Why did we ever come here?" she inquired of Straker. "These roses
are horribly unbecoming to me."

"Nothing is unbecoming to you, and you jolly well know it," said
Furnival.

She ignored it.

"Just look at their complexions. They oughtn't to be allowed about."

She picked one and laid it against the dead-white hollow of her
breast, and curled her neck to look at it t