cars, a few palaces and most of the two
hemispheres. She declined.

"If I were young, would you marry me?"

Zora's beautiful shoulders gave the tiniest shrug of uncertainty. Perhaps
her young friend was right, and the command of the earth was worth the
slight penalty of a husband. She was tired and disheartened at finding
herself no nearer to the heart of things than when she had left Nunsmere.
Her attitude toward the once unspeakable sex had imperceptibly changed. She
no longer blazed with indignation when a man made love to her. She even
found it more agreeable than looking at cataracts or lunching with
ambassadors. Sometimes she wondered why. The senator she treated very
tenderly.

"I don't know. How can I tell?" she said a moment or two after the shrug.

"My heart is young," said he.

Zora met his eyes for the millionth part of a second and turned her head
away, deeply sorry for him. The woman's instinctive look dealt
instantaneous death to his hopes. It was one more enactment of the tragedy
of the bald head and the gray beard. He spoke with pathetic bitterness.
Like Don Ruy Gomez da Silva in "Hernani," he gave her to understand that
now, when a young fellow passed him in the street, he would give up all his
motor-cars and all his colossal canned-salmon business for the young
fellow's raven hair and bright eyes.

"Then you would love me. I could make you."

"What is love, after all?" asked Zora.

The elderly senator looked wistfully through the years over an infinite
welter of salmon-tins, seeing nothing else.

"It's the meaning of life," said he. "I've discovered it too late."

He went away sorrowful, and Zora saw the vanity of great possessions.

On the homeward steamer she had as a traveling companion a young Englishman
whom she had met at Los Angeles, one Anthony Dasent, an engineer of some
distinction. He was bronzed and healthy and lithe-limbed. She liked him
because he had brains and looked her squarely in the face. On the first
evening of the voyage a slight lurch of the vessel caused her to slip, and
she would have fallen had he not caught her by the arms. For the first time
she realized how strong a man could be. It was a new sensation, not
unpleasurable, and in thanking him she blushed. He remained with her on
deck, and talked of their California friends and the United States. The
next day he established himself by her side, and discoursed on the sea and
the sky, human aspirations, the discomf