her, with an idle
caress by the way, a kiss gently dropped on the inside of her white
wrist.

She followed his every movement with a strange speculative look in her
eyes, almost as if he were some new and strange animal that she was
studying for the first time.

When she spoke again, it was to go on as if she had not been
interrupted, "It seems to me that man comes out of a great passion
just as good as new, while a woman is shattered--in a moral
sense--and never fully recovers herself."

Shattuck's back was toward her when he replied. "Sorry to spoil any
more illusions, dear child, but how about the long list of men who are
annually ruined by it? The men in the prisons, the men who kill
themselves, the men who hang for it?"

"Those are crimes. I am not talking of the criminal classes, but of
the world in which normal people live."

"Our set," he laughed, "but that is not the whole world, alas!"

"I know that men--well bred, cultivated, refined, even honorable
men,--seem to be able to repeat every emotion of life. A woman scales
the heights but once. Hence it must depend, in the case of women
capable of deep love--on the men whether the relation into which
marriage betrays them be decent or indecent. What I should like to be
able to discover is--what provision does either man or civilization
propose to make for the woman whom Fate, in wanton irony, reduces,
even in marriage, to the self-considered level of the girl in the
street?"

There was amazement--even a foreboding--on Shattuck's face as he
paused in his walk, and, for the first time speaking anxiously
ejaculated, "I swear I don't follow you!"

She went on as if she had not been interrupted, as if she had
something to say which had to be said, as if she were reasoning it out
for herself: "Take my case. I don't claim that it is uncommon. I do
claim that I was not the woman for the situation. I was an only child.
My father's marriage had not been happy. I was brought up by a
disappointed man on philosophy and pessimism."

"Old sceptics, and modern scoffers. I remember it well."

"Before I was out of my teens, I had imbibed a mistrust for all
emotions. Perhaps you did not know that? You may have thought, because
they were not all on the outside, that I had none. My poor father had
hoped, with his teachings, to save me from future misery. He had
probably thought to spare me the commonplace sorrows of love. But he
could not."

"There is one thing, my chi