s so sincerely sorry for you."

"Sorry! I have a distinct recollection of being abominably rude to
you that night, and unpleasant afterward. Can you, will you forgive
me?"

"What? Five years after the offense? No. I forgave you at the time;
I'm not going to do it all over again. What does it matter? It's all
so long ago. The funny part of it was that I wasn't a bit annoyed
with you, but I was furious with--whom do you think?"

"I haven't a notion if it wasn't with me."

"It was a she--the other lady, the woman I wasn't, the woman you
thought I was, my ideal self. Needless to say, my feminine jealousy
was such that I could have throttled her. I suppose I did pretty
well do for her as it happened. There can be nothing deader than a
dead idea."

"Don't be too sure. I have known them come to life again."

His gaze, that had fallen, and was resting on the hem of her blue
serge gown, now traveled up the long, slender line of her limbs,
past the dim curves of her body to the wonder of her face. How
marvelously changed she was! She was not only both younger and older
than when he had left her five years ago, she was another woman. The
heaviness had gone from her eyes and forehead, the bitter,
determined, self-restraint from her mouth and chin; instead of
self-restraint she had acquired that rarer virtue, self-possession.
Her lips had softened, had blossomed into the sweet red flower that
was part of Nature's original design. Her face had grown plastic to
her feeling and her thought. She was ripened and freshened by sun
and wind, by salt water and salt air; a certain nameless, intangible
grace that he had caught once, twice, long ago, and seen no more,
was now her abiding charm. The haggard, sallow-faced provincial,
with her inscrutable manners and tumultuous heart, had developed
into the finished cosmopolitan; she had about her the glory and
bloom of the world. For once his artist's instinct had failed him;
he had not discovered the promise of her physical beauty--but that
he should have ignored the finer possibilities of her soul! If she
had really known all that he had thought and felt about her then,
had understood and had yet forgiven him, Frida was unlike any other
woman in the world. He was not sure that this was not the secret of
her charm--the marvelous dexterity of her sympathy, the swiftness
with which she precipitated herself into his point of view. It had
its drawbacks; it meant that she could see another ma