“So this is Sylvia,” he said, with the slightest appearance of interest, glancing at her casually.  “I always said you would make a beautiful woman.  But since I knew Victoria, I’ve seen that you must be quite what she was at your age.”  It might have been a voice speaking from beyond the grave, so listless, so dragging was its rhythm.  “How do you happen to be in Paris?” he asked.  “Are your parents still alive?”

“Oh yes!” said Sylvia, half startled by the preposterousness of the idea that they might not be.  “They’re very well too.  I had such a good letter from Mother the other day.  Do you remember Professor Kennedy?  He has just given up his position to be professor emeritus.  I suppose now he’ll write that book on the idiocy of the human race he’s been planning so long.  And old Mr. Reinhardt, he’s still the same, they say ... wonderful, isn’t it, at his age?” She was running on, not knowing what to say, and chattering rather foolishly in her embarrassment.  “Judith is a trained nurse; isn’t that just the right thing for her?  I’m visiting Aunt Victoria here for a while.  Lawrence is a Freshman at....”

He broke in, his hollow voice resounding in the immense, vault-like spaces around them.  “You’d better go home,” he said.  “I’d leave tonight, if I were you.”  She looked at him startled, half-scared, thinking that she had been right to fancy him out of his mind.  She saw with relief a burly attendant in a blue uniform lounging near a group of statuary.  She could call to him, if it became necessary.

“You’d better go away from her at once,” went on the man, advancing aimlessly from one bay of the frescoes to another.

Sylvia knew now of whom he was speaking, and as he continued talking with a slow, dreary monotony, her mind raced back over the years, picking up a scrap here, a half-forgotten phrase there, an intercepted look between her father and mother, a recollection of her own, a half-finished sentence of Arnold’s ...

“She can’t be fatal for you in the same way she has been for the others, of course,” the man was saying.  “What she’ll do for you is to turn you into a woman like herself.  I remember now, I have thought many times, that you were like her ... of the same clay.  But you have something else too, you have something that she’ll take away from you if you stay.  You can’t keep her from doing it.  No one can get the better of her.  She doesn’t fight.  But she always takes life.  She has taken mine.  She must have taken her bogie-husband’s, she took young Gilbert’s, she took Gilbert’s wife’s, she took Arnold’s in another way....  God! think of leaving a young, growing, weak soul in the care of a woman like Victoria!  She took that poet’s, I forget his name; I suppose by this time Felix Morrison is ...”