accompanied her to the door, her hand
resting lightly against the crisp organdie belt.

"Will you pour out the tea for me?" she asked, sweetly. "I doubt if I go
down."

No small part of her dangerous fascination lay in her sincerity. She
really liked Isabel, although it was characteristic of her that she did
not in the least care at what conclusions that puzzled young woman might
arrive in a more solitary meditation.

When Isabel found herself in the long cool corridor, set thick with
gentle landscapes, and hunting squires, and dames haughty and humble,
she drew a long breath of relief, as if she had escaped from a jungle.
But she felt oddly wounded in her self-love, young and silly. She had
thought herself old in the last three years, tremendously modern. What
did she know? The easy morals of students in France and Germany had
repelled her at first, but she had ended by accepting them as a matter
of course, and had rather plumed herself upon her accumulating grains
and blends of human nature. She felt a rush of contempt for their
crudity. What children they were with their simple unmorality of
artists, as ignorant of the real world as babes in a wood!

When she reached her own room she astonished herself by bursting into a
passion of tears. It was some time before she understood what had
induced it. It was not that the illusions of youth had received a hard
blow, for many of them had disappeared long since in Paris, when she had
supported an American girl of decent family but too much liberty through
the most desperate experience that a young woman, alone and friendless
in a foreign city, well could have. The girl had died cursing all men
and the folly of women, and after Isabel had buried her and the leading
cause of her repentance, she returned to her lonely flat in a state of
disillusion and disgust which seemed to encase her by no means
susceptible heart in a triple panoply. This state of mind had lasted for
at least three months. And there was little of which she had not
abstract knowledge, nor had she lived a quarter of a century to learn
for the first time of the license which the world permits to women so
highly placed that they have come to believe themselves above all laws.

But all her experience and abstract knowledge counted for nothing, and
she had for the first time a sudden and complete appreciation of the
evil of the world and of its odd association with even the higher
virtues; of the fact that i