“Why, I haven’t heard that he was dead.”  She looked at him curiously.  “Where did you make his acquaintance?”

“I never clapped eyes on him,” was the reply.  “But I read some of his poetry out of that book there on the table just before you come in.  How do you like his poetry?”

And thereat she began to talk quickly and easily upon the subject he had suggested.  He felt better, and settled back slightly from the edge of the chair, holding tightly to its arms with his hands, as if it might get away from him and buck him to the floor.  He had succeeded in making her talk her talk, and while she rattled on, he strove to follow her, marvelling at all the knowledge that was stowed away in that pretty head of hers, and drinking in the pale beauty of her face.  Follow her he did, though bothered by unfamiliar words that fell glibly from her lips and by critical phrases and thought-processes that were foreign to his mind, but that nevertheless stimulated his mind and set it tingling.  Here was intellectual life, he thought, and here was beauty, warm and wonderful as he had never dreamed it could be.  He forgot himself and stared at her with hungry eyes.  Here was something to live for, to win to, to fight for—­ay, and die for.  The books were true.  There were such women in the world.  She was one of them.  She lent wings to his imagination, and great, luminous canvases spread themselves before him whereon loomed vague, gigantic figures of love and romance, and of heroic deeds for woman’s sake—­for a pale woman, a flower of gold.  And through the swaying, palpitant vision, as through a fairy mirage, he stared at the real woman, sitting there and talking of literature and art.  He listened as well, but he stared, unconscious of the fixity of his gaze or of the fact that all that was essentially masculine in his nature was shining in his eyes.  But she, who knew little of the world of men, being a woman, was keenly aware of his burning eyes.  She had never had men look at her in such fashion, and it embarrassed her.  She stumbled and halted in her utterance.  The thread of argument slipped from her.  He frightened her, and at the same time it was strangely pleasant to be so looked upon.  Her training warned her of peril and of wrong, subtle, mysterious, luring; while her instincts rang clarion-voiced through her being, impelling her to hurdle caste and place and gain to this traveller from another world, to this uncouth young fellow with lacerated hands and a line of raw red caused by the unaccustomed linen at his throat, who, all too evidently, was soiled and tainted by ungracious existence.  She was clean, and her cleanness revolted; but she was woman, and she was just beginning to learn the paradox of woman.

“As I was saying—­what was I saying?” She broke off abruptly and laughed merrily at her predicament.