made
with her accustomed lightness, he knew instinctively that she had sought
him less for diversion than for advice, and that her reckless pen had
been guided by some hidden agitation. When he thought of her it was with
a sympathy hardly justified by the outward brilliance of her
life--wealth, beauty, power, all the things which he would have called
desirable were hers, and the vague compassion she awoke in him appeared
to him the result of a simple trick of pathos which she knew how to
assume at times. To be sorry for Gerty was absurd, he had always looked
upon a hunger for married romance as a morbid and unhealthy passion, and
that a woman who possessed a generous husband should demand a faithful
one as well seemed to him the freak of an unreasonable and exacting
temper. "Men were not born monogamous"--it was a favourite cynicism of
his, for he was inclined to throw upon nature the full burden of her
responsibility.

Then, as he signalled a cab at the corner of Fifth Avenue, and after
seating himself, clasped his gloved hands over the crook of his walking
stick, his thoughts returned, impatient of distraction, to the
disturbing memory of Laura.

He had gone too far, this he admitted promptly and without
consideration--another minute of her bewildering charm and he felt, with
a shiver, that he might have blundered irretrievably into a declaration
of love. What a fool he had been, after all, and where was the result of
his painfully acquired caution--of his varied experiences with many
women? Before entering her doors he had told himself emphatically that
the thing should go no further than a pleasant friendship, and yet an
hour later he had found his thoughts fairly wallowing in sentiment. To
like a woman and not make love to her--was that dream of his purer
desires still beyond him--still in the distant region of the happier
impossibilities? Marriage had few allurements for him--the respect he
felt for it as an institution was equalled only by the disgust with
which he regarded it as a personal condition; and a shudder ran through
him now as he imagined himself tied to any woman upon earth for the
remainder of his days. Without being unduly proud in his own conceit, he
was clearly aware that he might be looked upon through worldly eyes as a
desirable match--as fair game for a number of wary marriageable maidens;
and it did not occur to him that even Laura herself might by any choice
of her own, still stand hopeles