s, to the sentimental
ones, a woman always seemed what she was not, a goddess, a saint, or
a sort of glorified sister; to the rest, she was an instrument of
amusement and pleasure, more or less necessary and more or less
purchasable. Perhaps an Englishman or an American, judging Greeks from
what he could learn about them in ordinary intercourse, would get
about as near the truth as Logotheti did. In his main conclusion the
latter was probably right; Mr. Van Torp's affections might be of such
exuberant nature as would admit of being divided between two or three
objects at the same time, or they might not. But when he spoke of
having the 'highest regard' for Madame Cordova, without denying the
facts about the interview in which he had asked her to marry him and
had lost his head because she refused, he was at least admitting that
he was in love with her, or had been at that time.

Mr. Van Torp also confessed that he had entertained a 'high regard'
for the beautiful Mrs. Bamberger, now unhappily insane. It was
noticeable that he had not used the same expression in speaking of
Lady Maud. Nevertheless, as in the Bamberger affair, he appeared as
the chief cause of trouble between husband and wife. Logotheti was
considered 'dangerous' even in Paris, and his experiences had not
been dull; but, so far, he had found his way through life without
inadvertently stepping upon any of those concealed traps through which
the gay and unwary of both sexes are so often dropped into the divorce
court, to the surprise of everybody. It seemed the more strange to
him that Rufus Van Torp, only a few years his senior, should now find
himself in that position for the second time. Yet Van Torp was not
a ladies' man; he was hard-featured, rough of speech, and clumsy of
figure, and it was impossible to believe that any woman could think
him good-looking or be carried away by his talk. The case of Mrs.
Bamberger could be explained; she might have had beauty, but she
could have had little else that would have appealed to such a man as
Logotheti. But there was Lady Maud, an acknowledged beauty in London,
thoroughbred, aristocratic, not easily shocked perhaps, but easily
disgusted, like most women of her class; and there was no doubt but
that her husband had found her under extremely strange circumstances,
in the act of receiving from Van Torp a large sum of money for which
she altogether declined to account. Van Torp had not denied that story
either,