am so curious as to how he will turn
out. He is blond, too. Well, _au 'voir_. I must go and dress."

* * * * *

If anyone had asked Dagny Harden, at that period, just what she wanted
of young Cleeve, she would not have known what to answer.

She was a great flirt, but, at the same time, she was a very kind
woman, and never willfully gave pain to anyone.

A careful study of the science of flirting and its masters and
mistresses would probably prove that the greatest--in the sense of
artistic skill--flirts are those people who have excitable brains and
little imagination.

Dagny Harden had been fond of him in a mild, domestic, sincere way
that satisfied both him and herself, and that had never faltered.

She had, however, a really remarkable dramatic talent, and this
needing outlet, she interested herself with a series of gracefully
conducted, scandal-avoiding flirtations, in which she appeared to each
man as a very good woman, found by him personally to be more charming
than she intended.

These men, some of them, suffered intensely during their term, but
they had no bitterness for her.

And she, liking them all--for she was discriminating, and never let
herself in for an affair with a dull man--had really no appreciation
of their suffering.

When she had turned a victim's mind and heart wrong side out; when she
had watched the wheels go round; when all had been said that could be
said without her nice scales of judgment being weighed down on the
side of either too great severity or too great indulgence, it was
good-by.

She was exquisitely ruthless, brutally enchanting, admirably cruel.

And she never talked of her victims to each other or to other women.
She was, in a way, great.

* * * * *

"I wish," said Teddy Cleeve, folding his arms as he sat on the low
stone wall, and looking at her, "that I was clever."

"Aren't you clever?"

"No."

"And if you were?"

"If I were, I'd know what you are thinking about."

This, too, is a milestone on the Dover Road.

"What I am thinking about? Well, at that moment I was thinking about
you."

"Honor bright?"

"Honor bright. I was wondering what you will be like in fifteen
years."

"Why fifteen?"

She smiled, and prodded with her stick at a bit of moss in a crack in
the wall. Somewhere below them there was a view, but it was far away.

"Well, because if you were forty you would be just my