rpness with
which he had turned her maneuver, and the way it had detached them from
the surrounding crowd. For there, in the dusky center of the room, it
was as if they watched from safe covert the rest of their party exposed
in the glare of light; though not, as Flora presently noted, quite
escaping observation themselves. For an instant Harry turned and peered
toward them with a look in his intentness that struck Flora as something
new in him, and made her wonder if he could be jealous. She turned
tentatively to see if Kerr had noticed it, and surprised his glance in a
quick transition back to hers.

"By your leave," he said, and took away her fan, which in his hand
presently assumed such rhythmic motion that it ceased to be any more
present to her than a delicate current of air upon her face. Her face,
which in the first place he had so well looked over, he now looked into
with something more personal in his quest, as if under the low brows and
crowding lashes there was a puzzle to solve in the timid, unassured
glances of such splendid eyes.

He was not, she felt sure, in spite of his light manipulation of her
fan, a person who cared to please women, but one of that devastating
sort who care above everything to please themselves, and who are skilful
without practice; too skilful, she feared, for her defenses to hold out
against if he intended to find out what she really thought. "Aren't we
supposed to be looking at the pictures?" she wanted to know.

He turned his back on the wall and its attendant glare. "Why pictures,"
he inquired, "when there are live people to look at? Pictures for places
where they're all half dead. But here, where even the damnable dust in
the street is alive, why should they paint, or write, or sculpt, or do
anything but live?" His irascible brows shot the query at her.

Again the proposition of life--whatever that was--was held up before
her, and as ever she faltered in the face of it. "I suppose they do it
here," she murmured, with a vague glance at the paintings around her,
"because people do it everywhere else."

His disparagement was almost a snarl. "That's the rotten part of
it--because they do it everywhere else! As if there wasn't enough
monotony in the world already without every chap trying to be like the
next instead of being himself!"

"Ah!" Her small, uncertain smile in the midst of her outward splendor
was pathetic. "But it is different to you. You're a man. You're not one