ought home from Florence.

He shook his head. "I am denied sugar. Has it ever occurred to you that
middle age ought to be called the age of denial?" Then his tone changed.
"But I wonder if you begin to realize how fortunate you are? You have
the collector's instinct and the means to gratify it. To discover with
you is to possess--don't you understand the blessing of that? You love
beauty as a favoured daughter, not as one of the disinherited who can
only peer through the windows of her palace."

"But you also--you love beauty as I do."

"But I can't own it--not as you do." He was speaking frankly. "I haven't
the means. At least what I have I have made myself, and therefore I
guard it more carefully. It is only those who have once been poor who
are really under the curse of money, for that curse is the inability to
understand that money is less valuable than anything else on earth that
you happen to need or desire. Now to me the most terrible thing on earth
is not to be without beauty, but to be without money--"

She smiled. "You are talking like Gideon Vetch."

He caught at the name quickly. "Like Gideon Vetch? You mean that I sound
ignoble?"

The laughter in his eyes made him look almost boyish, and she felt that
she had come suddenly close to him. After all he was very attractive.

"Is he ignoble?" she asked. "I have seen him only once, and that was at
the dinner a week ago."

He looked at her intently. "I should like to know what you think."

"I hardly know--but--well, I must confess that I was disappointed."

"You expected something better?"

She hesitated over her answer. "I expected something different. I
suppose I looked for the dash of purple--or at least of red--in his
appearance."

"And he seemed ordinary?"

"In a way--yes. His features are not striking, and yet when he talks to
you and gets interested in his own ideas, he sheds a kind of warmth that
is like magnetism. I couldn't analyse it, but it is there."

"That, I suppose, is the charm of which they talk. Warmth, or perhaps
heat, is a better word for it. Fortunately I'm proof against it because
of what you might call an asbestos temperament; but I've seen it catch
fire in a crowd, and it sweeps over an audience like a blaze over a
prairie. It is a cheap kind of oratory; yet it is a power in
unscrupulous hands--and Vetch is unscrupulous."

"You believe that?"

"I know it. It has been proved again and again that he will stoop to any
mean