chanan kept her ambiguous eyes half merrily, half pensively upon
her. 'Of course, if he were very nice. I wouldn't marry a man who wasn't
nice for money.'

'Surely you couldn't marry a man unless you were in love with him?'

'Certainly I could. Money lasts, and love so often doesn't.' Helen
continued to smile as she spoke.

There was now a tremor of pain in Althea's protest. 'Dear Miss Buchanan,
I can't bear to hear you speak like that. I can't bear to think of any
one so lovely doing anything so sordid, so miserable, as making a
_mariage de convenance_.' Tears rose to her eyes.

Miss Buchanan was again silent for a moment, and it was now her turn to
look slightly confused. 'It's very nice of you to mind,' she said; and
she added, as if to help Althea not to mind, 'But, you see, I am sordid;
I am miserable.'

'Sordid? Miserable? Do you mean unhappy?' Poor Althea gazed, full of her
most genuine distress.

'Oh no; I mean in your sense. I'm a poor creature, quite ordinary and
grubby; that's all,' said Miss Buchanan.

They said nothing more of it then, beyond Althea's murmur of now
inarticulate protest; but the episode probably remained in Miss
Buchanan's memory as something rather puzzling as well as rather
pitiful, this demonstration of a feeling so entirely unexpected that she
had not known what to do with it.

If, in these graver matters, she distressed Althea, in lesser ones she
was continually, if not distressing her, at all events calling upon her,
in complete unconsciousness, for readjustments of focus that were
sometimes, in their lesser way, painful too. When she asserted that she
was not musical, Althea almost suspected her of saying it in order to
evade her own descriptions of experiences at Bayreuth. Pleasantly as she
might listen, it was sometimes, Althea had discovered, with a restive
air masked by a pervasive vagueness; this vagueness usually drifted over
her when Althea described experiences of an intellectual or aesthetic
nature. It could be no question of evasion, however, when, in answer to
a question of Althea's, she said that she hated Paris. Since girlhood
Althea had accepted Paris as the final stage in a civilised being's
education: the Theatre Francais, the lectures at the Sorbonne, the
Louvre and the Cluny, and, for a later age, Anatole France--it seemed
almost barbarous to say that one hated the splendid city that clothed,
as did no other place in the world, one's body and one's mind. 'Ho