the hand in his. 'It's an initiation. A dedication.'

'A dedication? To what?' Mrs. Dallas asked, and even more kindly; yet her kindness made her more removed.

Her words seemed to strike with soft yet bruising blows upon his heart. "To life. To love,' he answered.

'And what about Marian?' Mrs. Dallas inquired. And now, still gently, she withdrew her hand and leaned her cheek on it as, her elbow on the cushions of her chair, she bent her indolent but attentive gaze upon him. 'I should have thought that dedication lay in that direction.'

His forehead was hot and his eyes, hurt, bewildered, indignant, challenged hers yet supplicated, too. 'Please don't let me think that I'm to hear mean conventionalities from you-as I have from Marian. You know,' he said, and his voice slightly shook, 'that dedication is n't a limiting, limited thing. You've read my books and cared for them, and understood them, better, you made me feel, than I did myself,so that you must n't pretend to forget. Love does n't shut out. It widens.'

'Does it?' said Mrs. Dallas. 'And what,' she added, 'were the mean conventionalities you heard from Marian? I've been wondering about Marian.'

'She is jealous,' said Rupert shortly, looking away. 'I could hardly believe it, but she made it too plain. It seemed to take the foundation-stones of our life away to hear her. It made all our past, all the things I believed we shared, seem illusory. It made me feel that the Marian I'd loved and trusted was a stranger.'

Mrs. Dallas contemplated his averted face, and as she heard him her glance altered. It withdrew itself; it veiled itself; it became at once less kind and more indolent. 'And you really don't think Marian has anything to complain of?' she inquired presently.

'No, I do not,' said Rupert. 'Nothing is taken from her.'

'Is n't it? And if I became your mistress, would you still think she had nothing to complain of?' Mrs. Dallas asked the question in a tone of detached and impartial inquiry.

How far apart in the young man's experience were theory and practice was manifested by the hot blush that sprang to his brow, the quick stare in which an acute eye might have read an ingenuous and provincial dismay. 'My mistress?' he stammered. 'You know that such a thought never entered my head.'

'Has n't it? Why not?'

'You know I only asked to serve to help to care for you.'

'You would think it wrong, then, to be unfaithful, technically, to your wife?'

'Wrong?' His brow showed the Saint-Bernard-puppy knot of perplexity. 'It's not a question of wrong. Wrongness lies only in the sort of love. Real love is sacred in all its expressions of itself; my ideal of love, just because it includes that one, can do without it.'

'But, on your theory, why should it do without it?' Mrs. Dallas, all mildness, inquired.

His mind was driven back to those questionings in the studio, when he had thought of the incongruous yet allied themes of passion and perambulators, and groped again, angrily, in the same obscurity. 'It's it's a matter of convenience,' he found, frowning; 'it -it wouldn't work in with other beautiful things. It would n't be convenient.'

'I'm glad to hear you give such a reasonable objection,' said Mrs. Dallas. 'There could hardly be a better one. It would n't be at all convenient. Though, I gather, if it could be made convenient, you still think that Marian would have nothing to complain of.'

'I don't know why you are trying to pin me down like this.' Rupert, stooping, gathered some flakes of stone from the path and scattered them with a sharp gesture that expressed his exasperation. 'You know what I believe. Love is free, free as air and sunshine. How can one stop one's self from loving? Why should one? And if our love, yours and mine, could mean that complete relation, then, yes, the ideal thing, the really ideal thing, would be for Marian to feel it right and beautiful and to be glad that there should be two perfected and completed relations instead of one. As it is, that inclusive vision is n't asked of her.'

'She's not, in fact, to be asked to be a Mormon,' Mrs. Dallas remarked. 'All that she has to put up with is that her husband should be in love, platonically, with another woman, and should have ceased to be in love with her. It's hard, you know, when some one has been in love with you, to give it up.'

'But I have not ceased to love Marian!' Rupert cried. 'Why should you suppose it? My love for you does n't shut out my love for her. It's a vulgar old remnant of sexual savagery to think it does. A mother does n't love one child the less for loving another. Why can't people purify and widen their minds by looking at the truth? That jeer about Mormons is unworthy of you. Marriage is a prison unless husband and wife are both free to go on giving and growing. What does love mean but growth?'

Mrs. Dallas's eyes had drifted away to her beds of carnations and they now rested on them for a little while. Rupert took up his hat and fanned himself. He was hot, and very miserable.

'It always strikes me, when I hear talk like yours,' said Mrs. Dallas presently, 'that it is so much less generous and noble than it imagines itself to be. It's the man, only, who frames the new

code and the man only who is to enlarge himself and run two or three loves abreast.'

'Not at all. Marian is precisely as free as I am to love somebody else as well as me.'

'As free? Oh no,' said Mrs. Dallas, laughing softly. "Theoretically, perhaps, but not actually. Nature has seen to that. When women have babies and lose their figures it's most unlikely that they'll ever be given an opportunity to exercise their freedom. That fact in itself should make you reconsider your ideas about love. Own frankly that they apply only to men and don't pretend to generosity. The only free women are the femmes galantes; and you'll observe that they are seldom burdened with a nursery, and that they never grow fat.'

She touched, with an accuracy malignant in its clairvoyance, the memory of his sub-conscious awareness about Marian's physical alteration. Something in him shrank away from her in fear and indignation. She was trying to make him see things from a false and petty standpoint, the standpoint of a woman of the world, a mere woman of the world-that world of shameful tolerances and cruel stupidities. 'I don't know anything about femmes galantes,' he said, 'nor do I wish to. You misunderstand me if you think that by love I mean sensuality.'

With slightly lifted brows she looked out at the carnations; and had she been angry with him he could have felt less angry with her. He was, indeed, very angry with her when she remarked, tranquilly, 'I don't think you know what you mean by love.'

'I mean by love what Shelley meant by it,' Rupert declared.

"True love in this differs from gold and clay,
That to divide is not to take away.
Love is like understanding that grows bright
Gazing on many truths.

if you like to call it by a name you imagine to be derogatory.' He felt himself warmed and sustained against the menace that emanated from her by the sound of his own familiar eloquence.

But Mrs. Dallas still tranquilly contemplated the carnations.

'That's the man's point of view. The view of the artist, the creator. Perhaps there's truth in it. Perhaps he can't write his poems and paint his pictures without taking intoxicants. But it will never be the view of the woman. Mary Shelley will never really like it when Shelley makes love to Jane Clairmont; Marian will never like it when you make love to me. They'll try to believe it's the ideal, to please him, when they are the ones he is in love with; but when he is in love with other women they won't go on believing it.'

"That is their fault, their littleness, then. The wide, glorious outlook is theirs, too, if they choose to open their eyes. I don't accept your antithesis for women,- humdrum respectability, roast mutton, milk pudding, or dissipation. I don't believe that when a woman marries and becomes a mother she must turn her back on love.'

Mrs. Dallas at this began to laugh, unkindly. "Turn her back on love? No indeed. Why should she? Can't she love her friends and her father and mother and sisters and brothers, as well as her husband and children? You idealists seem always to forget these means of expansion. By love you mean simply and solely the intoxicant. Call it poetry and religion, if you like, but don't expect other people, who merely see that you are intoxicated, to call it that.'

absently, with languid fingers, she seemed to be breaking his idols as though they had been silly little earthenware figures, not good enough-here was the stab, the bewilderment-for her drawing-room. And who was she to do it, this remote, mysterious creature, steeped in the perfume of her passionate past? He felt as he gazed at her that it was not only himself he must defend against her.

'It's curious to me to hear you talk in this way.' He armed himself, as he spoke, with all that he could muster of wisdom and of weight. 'You are the last woman I'd have expected to hear it from. You've made me your friend, so that I'd have a right to be frank, even if you had n't let me love you. What right have you to turn your back on all the beauty and romance of life

to smile and mock them? You have n't allowed yourself to be bandaged and crippled by convention, I'm sure of it. You have followed your heart -bravely, truly out into life. You have loved - and loved- and loved,

I know it. It breathes from you. It's all you've lived for.'

'And you think the result so satisfactory?' said Mrs. Dallas. She looked at him now, and if it was with irony it was with sadness. She turned from her question. 'Well, if you like, I am one of the femmes galantes; they are of many types, you know; I was n't thinking, when I shocked you so, of the obvious, gross type. I was thinking of the woman who corresponds to you- the idealist, the spiritual femme galante. And, I'm convinced of it, for a woman, it doesn't work. A man, if he is a big man, or has a big life, it is n't always the same thing, by the way, may have his succession of passions, or, as you'd claim, and I don't believe it, — his contemporaneities; he has a context to frame them in; they may fall into place.

VOL. 117-NO. 1

in those terms of dimension. It is big. enough for the emotion that leads to marriage and to the loves that grow from that, the loves you think so little of. It is an emotion that can't be repeated over and over again simply because, in a normal life, it has grown into something else, something even better, I should say: a form of poetry and rapture and religion quite compatable with roast mutton and respectability. But the women who miss the normal life and who try to live on the emotions, they-well, I can only say that to my mind they always come to look silly. Silly is the only word for them.'

'No, I've not hurt myself,' said Mrs. Dallas. 'I've been hurt, perhaps; but I've not allowed my hurts to repeat themselves too often. Some things in life should be unique and final. The people who don't keep them so become shoddy. Marian, for instance, is neither hard nor cold, nor shoddy, either. You have made one of the mistakes that idealists are always making in imagining that she was humdrum respectability and that I was poetry and rapture and religion. — Oh, it's no good protesting. If I had a double chin and thin hair you'd never have wanted to help my soul, however unhappy I was. And if Marian had sat about in

'Why should I?' Mrs. Dallas asked. 'I'm not of the idealist type. I don't confuse intoxication with religion and think I have the one when I've only the other. I may have missed the real thing, but I've not repeated the emotion that ought to lead to it. You are quite mistaken in imagining that I've loved and loved and loved. I have n't. I have allowed other people to love me. That, as you'll own, is a very different matter. I am hard and cold and disillusioned. I am not soft and yearning and frustrated. Why should I look silly?'

He stared at her, and his heart was flooded with pain. What was she, then? What was her feeling for him? What had she meant? As she spoke and as he looked at her, the veil of romance dissolved from about her and he saw her for the first time with her own eyes, devoid of poetry, a hard, cold, faded, worldly woman. Yet she was still a Sphinx, strange and alluring, and still he struggled against her, for her, saying hotly, though his heart was chilled, 'If it's true, you've hurt yourself you've hurt yourself horribly, through fear of looking silly.'

mysterious and not let you feel sure that she cared about you, you would probably have remained in love with her. So, please own that you have been mistaken and that on the one side is love, the love that Marian feels for you, although she knows you; because she knows you; and on the other is illusion, intoxication; sensuality, yes, my dear Rupert, such as you felt when I let kiss my hand a little while ago.'

you

He sat, sullen, even sulky, half turned from her, and again he stooped and gathered up the flakes of stone and tossed them away down the path.

The clink and chink of ice and glass was heard approaching through the drawing-room, and the maid stepped out bearing the tray, which she set down on a wicker table before her mistress. The tall crystal jug, veiled in frosty rime, showed tones of jade and chalcedony, and fillets of lemon peel threaded it like pale, bright enamel. This gem-like beaker, the plate of golden cakes, with the scent of the carnations, with Mrs. Dallas's little foot on its cushion, with her rings of pearl and ruby, had all been part of the magic she had meant to him. The very sound of the ice, dully yet resonantly chink

ing, brought a suffocating sense of nostalgia. It was over, all over. He was disenchanted. She was cruel to him, to him who had loved her. She had cut into him and killed bright, ingenuous, trustful things. And, in a placid voice, she asked him if he would have some cake, and filled his glass.

He took it from her and drank it off in silence. The icy, aromatic liquid seemed an antidote to that other intoxicant she had mocked. Irony flowed through his veins; a bitter-sweet sense of vengeful maturity. When he set down the glass, he looked up at her, and he felt himself measuring his sword against the stiletto of an adversary.

'Well, I've had my lesson,' he said. 'I've been a generous but deluded idealist, it seems, in imagining that men and women are equals in their claims on life. Since I'm an artist, I have a right to my raptures, I take it. And poor Marian must be jealous with reason. Well, well; it's an odd morality to hear preached.'

Mrs. Dallas still sipped her lemonade and she quietly considered him. She said nothing, and even after she had finished and set down her glass she sat for still a little while in silence.

'I'm sorry I've seemed to preach,' she then remarked, 'but I certainly think that Marian has every right to be jealous. What more did I say? That a man is n't as ridiculous and undignified as a woman when he falls in and out of love-affairs on the condition that he has a big life? That was it, was n't it?'

"That was it, and I'm glad to have your assurance that you and I are in no danger of being ridiculous or undignified.'

'Do you mean,' said Mrs. Dallas, looking at him, 'that you think yours such a big life?'

It had been, before, his heart, its tenderness, its devotion and dedication that

she had cut into; it was into something deeper now, something more substantially and vitally at the centre of his life, something of which his heart and all its ardors were but tributaries. He was to learn that self-love could bleed with a fiercer, darker gush. The blood, as if foretelling his ordeal, sprang to his forehead as he looked back at her.

'I have my art,' he said, and he disdained any pretended humility; he spoke with pride and even with solemnity. 'I live for my art. I don't think that I am an insignificant man.'

'Don't you?' said Mrs. Dallas. It was with an unaffected curiosity that her eyes rested on him, and it sank into him, drop by drop, like poison. 'Not insignificant, perhaps,' she took up after a moment. "That's not quite the word, perhaps. You are very intelligent and appreciative and good-hearted. I don't suppose one can be quite insignificant if one is that. But do you call it art, your writing? I wonder. Oh, you are quite right to live for it, of course, just as other men do for stockbroking or fox-hunting or print-collecting, or anything else that employs their energies or satisfies their tastes or brings in money; but, to count as art, a man's activities must mean more than just his own satisfaction in them, must n't they? You write careful, intelligent, sentimental little books; but I can't feel that the world would be any the poorer if you were to take to stockbroking or fox-hunting instead. No, it does n't seem to me, my dear Rupert, that your life is nearly large enough for a succession of love-affairs. It's all right when one is young and looking for a mate; experiments are in order then; but you've found your mate, and you'll soon be not so very young, and if on the strength of your art you imagine yourself entitled to unseasonable intoxications, you'll become, in time, an emotional dram-drinker, one of