erty's for
instance."

"You think not?" he made a face of playful astonishment. "Well, how
about its hitting off our friend Perry?"

"Perry!" she replied disdainfully. "Do you know if he weren't so simple,
I'd detest him."

"But why?" His eyebrows were still elevated.

"Because he thinks of nothing under the sun but the sensations of his
great big body."

"Well, that may not be magnificent," he paraphrased gayly, "but it is
man."

"Then, thank heaven, it isn't woman!" she exclaimed.

"Do you mean to tell me," he leaned forward in his chair and she was
conscious suddenly that he was very close to her--closer, in spite of
the intervening space, than any man had ever been in her life before,
"do you honestly mean to tell me that women are different?"

The expression of his face altered as it always did before an
approaching change in his mood, and she saw in it something of the
satiety--the moral weariness--which is the Nemesis of the soul that is
led by pleasure. It was at this moment that she felt an exquisite
confidence in the man himself--in the man hidden behind the cynicism,
the affectation, the utter vanity of words.

"Oh, they can't devote themselves to their own sensations when they have
to think so much of other people's," she responded merrily; and she felt
again the strange impulse of retreat, the prompting to fly before the
earnestness that appeared in his voice. While he was flippant, her
intuitions told her that she might be serious, but when the banter
passed from his tone, she turned to it instinctively as to a defence.

"But those that I have known"--he stopped and looked at her as if he
weighed with an experienced eye the exact effect of his words.

She laughed, but it was a laugh of irritation rather than humour.
"Perhaps you did not select your examples very wisely," she remarked.

Her look arrested him as he was about to reply, and he spoke evidently
upon the impulse of the moment. "Did Gerty tell you about Madame Alta?"
he enquired.

She shook her head with an evasion of the question, "I don't remember
that it was Gerty."

"But you have heard of her?"

"I've _heard_ her," she answered. "It is a very beautiful voice."

He frowned with a nervous irritation, and she saw from his impatient
movements that he was under the influence of a disagreeable excitement.

"Well, I was once in love with her," he said bluntly.

She made an indifferent gesture.

"And now I hate her," he added