one lifelong weakness was
that any woman of average intelligence, who chose to take the trouble,
could sound him through every note of his gamut, and the Baroness de
Wyeth seemed to find a lively satisfaction in the exercise of her own
power in that direction.

There was no further sign of Annette that evening, and it was not until
the Baroness had retired that Paul began again seriously to remember
her. It would at any moment, since his discovery of the lure by which
she had beguiled him into marriage, have seemed a mere ridiculous
prudery of conscience to hide from himself that he had thrown the better
part of his life away; but he had meant to do his duty as it seemed to
lie plain and straight before him, and he meant it still, increasingly
difficult as it appeared. But all the talk of the lonely soul, of the
eternal isolation of the spirit, in which man was doomed to live, all
the tinsel sentimentalisms of which the talk of the bilingual poetess
had mainly consisted, afforded perhaps as poor a pabulum as he could
anywhere have found. There was he, with that sore-stricken heart of his,
so sore-stricken, indeed, that it was well-nigh numbed, and here for the
first time in his life he had met a woman of more than common surface
breeding, of high family--for the Baroness de Wyeth was guilty of no
mere vulgar brag in claiming so much for herself--of more than ordinary
attractiveness in person, and of far more than common faculty in the
direction of a dangerous, sympathetic semi-humbug. Was it any wonder if,
when he lay down that night, he contrasted the hours of the evening
with those of the afternoon, or if he recalled the fact that at the
very turning of the road which had led him to fortune and to fame he had
thrown away all that could make them really worth the having?

Annette was sleeping off the fumes of brandy and the insane hysteria
which went along with them. The dainty lady from whom he had just
parted was going to her repose with her own beautiful, sad thoughts in
a refinement of surrounding which he could only fancy. His thoughts
followed her to her chamber until it seemed to him that he was in some
sort guilty of a profanation, and with that touch of self-chiding the
born sex-worshipper must needs flash into a mood of adoration. A more
thoroughpaced small coquette than La Femme Incomprise never breathed,
yet she must needs be a holy angel for the time being to Paul Armstrong,
because she had fine eyes and