Though several days had passed since the Club affair, he had not seen Beth Truba again.  This fact largely occupied his thinking.  He would not telephone nor call, without a suggestion from her.  The moment had not come to bring up her name to David Cairns, who, since his talk with Beth, had of course nothing to offer.  So Bedient revolved in outer darkness....  The morning after Hedda Gabler he found a very good chestnut saddle-mare in an up-town stable, and rode for an hour or two in the Park, returning to the Club after eleven.  At the office, he was told that Mrs. Wordling had asked for him to go up to her apartment, as soon as he came in.  Five minutes later, he knocked at her door.

“Is that you, Mr. Bedient?” she called.  The voice came seemingly from an inner room; a cultivated voice, with that husky note in it which charms the multitude.  Had he not a good mental picture of Mrs. Wordling, he would have imagined some enchanted Dolores....  “How good of you to come!  Just wait one moment.”

The door opened partially after a few seconds, and he caught the gleam of a bare arm, but the actress had disappeared when he entered.  Bedient was in a room where a torrential shower had congealed into photographs.

“I can’t help it,” she said at last, emerging from the inner room, unhooked....  “I’ve been trying to get a maid up here for the past half-hour....  I think there’s only three or four between the shoulder-blades—­won’t you do them for me?”

She backed up to him bewitchingly....  Mrs. Wordling was in the twenty-nine period.  If the thing can be imagined, she gave the impression of being both voluptuous and athletic.  There was a rose-dusk tone under her healthy skin, where the neck went singing down to the shoulder, singing of warm blood and plenteous.  Hers was the mid-height of woman, so that Bedient was amusedly conscious of the length of his hands, as he stood off for a second surveying the work to do.

“What’s the trouble; can’t you?”

There was a purring tremble in her tone that stirred the wanderer, only it was the past entirely that moved within him.  The moment had little more rousing for him, than if he were asked to fasten a child’s romper....  Yet he did not miss that here was one of the eternal types of man’s pursuit—­as natural a man’s woman as ever animated a roomful of photographs—­a woman who could love much, and, as Heine added, many.

“I’ll just throw a shawl around, if you can’t,” she urged, nudging her shoulder.

“Far too warm for shawls,” he laughed.  “I was only getting it straight in my mind before beginning.  You know it’s tricksome for one accustomed mainly to men’s affairs....  There’s one—­I won’t pinch—­and the second—­anytime you can’t find a maid, Mrs. Wordling—­I’m in the Club a good deal—­there they are, if they don’t fly open——­” and his hands fell with a pat on each of her shoulders.