make some ghastly mistake,
pursuing his own will under the guise of love, as he had once pursued it
under the guise of retribution--to Elizabeth's hurt and his own remorse.

All this Elizabeth understood, more or less plainly. Then came the
question--granted the situation, how was she to deal with it? Just as he
surmised that he could win her if he would, she too believed that were
she merely to set herself to prove her own love and evoke his, she could
probably break down his resistance. A woman knows her own power.
Feverishly, Elizabeth was sometimes on the point of putting it out, of
so provoking and appealing to the passion she divined, as to bring him,
whether he would or no, to her feet.

But she hesitated. She too felt the responsibility of his life, as of
hers. Could she really do this thing--not only begin it, but carry it
through without repentance, and without recoil?

She made herself look steadily at this English spectacle with its
luxurious complexity, its concentration within a small space of all the
delicacies of sense and soul, its command of a rich European tradition,
in which art and literature are living streams springing from
fathomless depths of life. Could she, whose every fibre responded so
perfectly to the stimulus of this environment, who up till now--but for
moments of revolt--had been so happy and at ease in it, could she wrench
herself from it--put it behind her--and adapt herself to quite another,
without, so to speak, losing herself, and half her value, whatever that
might be, as a human being?

As we know, she had already asked herself the question in some fashion,
under the shadow of the Rockies. But to handle it in London was a more
pressing and poignant affair. It was partly the characteristic question
of the modern woman, jealous, as women have never been before in the
world's history, on behalf of her own individuality. But Elizabeth put
it still more in the interests of her pure and passionate feeling for
Anderson. He must not--he should not--run any risks in loving her!

On a certain night early in December, Elizabeth had been dining at one
of the great houses of London. Anderson too had been there. The dinner
party, held in a famous room panelled with full-length Vandycks, had
been of the kind that only London can show; since only in England is
society at once homogeneous enough and open enough to provide it. In
this house, also, the best traditions of an older regime still