ths in the art which even his
free and easy life had never given him occasion to dream of, he became
infatuated--so infatuated that the following dialogue passed over him
and did not wake him.

"Why are you crying?" asked Lewis, whom tears had never before made
curious.

"I'm crying," gasped Folly, stamping her little foot, "because it's
taken so _long_!"

Lewis looked down at her brown head, buried against his shoulder, and
asked dreamily:

"Are you spirit and flower, libertine and saint?"

To which Folly replied: "Well, I was the flower-girl once in a great
hit, and I played 'The Nun' last season, you remember. As for spirits, I
had the refusal of one of the spirit parts in the first "Blue Bird"
show, but there were too many of them, so I turned it down. I'd have
felt as though I'd gone back to the chorus. Libertine," she mused
finally--"what _is_ a libertine?"

Lewis's father could have looked at Folly from across the street and
given her a very complete and charming definition for a libertine in one
word. But Lewis had not yet reached that wisdom which tells us that man
learns to know himself last of all. He did not realize that your
true-born libertine never knows it. Whatever Folly's life may have been,
and he thought he had no illusions on that score, he seized upon her
question as proving that she still held the potential bloom of youth and
a measure of innocence.

To do her justice, Folly was young, and also she had asked her question
in good faith. As to innocence--well, what has never consciously
existed, causes no lack. Folly's little world was exceedingly broad in
one way and as narrow in another, but, like few human worlds, it
contained a miracle. The miracle was that it absolutely satisfied her.
She dated happiness, content, and birth itself from the day she went
wrong.

She had the appearance of being frank, open, and lovable, just as she
had that appearance of culture which every woman of her type gets from
the cultivated class of men they prey upon. Pet her, and she murmured
softly in the king's best English: scratch her, and, like the rock that
Moses struck, she burst forth in a surprising torrent. Without making
others merry, she was eternally merry. Without ever feeling the agony of
thirst, she instilled thirst. A thousand broken-hearted women might have
looked on her as an avenging sword, if the sword hadn't been two-edged.
She had a motto, a creed, a philosophy, packed into four words: