He stopped and pointed at the picture lying on Vi’s lap.

“Don’t you see where her philosophy helps you?  You’ve got all the elements of power that she lacked—­beauty, wit, breeding, wealth, and—­yes—­and mind.  She had that, too, but she didn’t know it.  With all that of your cargo left, can’t you trade honestly with life?  Can’t you make life worth while, not only just to yourself?  You’ll be trading in compensations, it’s true.”

Leighton started walking up and down again.

“In one of my many brilliant moments,” he went on, “I defined a compensation to Lewis as something that doesn’t quite compensate.  There you have the root of most of the sadness in life.  But believe me, my dear girl, almost all the live people you and I know are trading in compensations, and this is what I want you to fasten on.  Some of them do it nobly.”

Leighton stood with folded arms, frowning at the floor.  Vi looked up at him but could not catch his eye.  She rose, picked up her wraps, and then came and stood before him.  She laid her fingers on his arms.

“Grapes,” she said, still without a drawl, “you have helped me—­a lot.  Good night.”  She held up her lips.

“No, Vi,” said Leighton, gravely.  “Just give up paying even for kindness with a kiss.”

Vi nodded her head.

“You’re right; only—­that kiss wouldn’t have been as old as I.”  She turned from him.  “I don’t think I’ll call you ‘Grapes’ any more.”

“Yes, you will,” said Leighton.  “We’re born into one name; we earn another.  We’ve got a right to the one we earn.  You see, even a man can’t have his cake——­”

But, with a wave of her hand, Vi was gone.  Leighton heard Nelton running down the stairs to call a cab for her.

CHAPTER XXXIV

Mlle. Folly Delaires was not born within a stone’s throw of the Paris fortifications, as her manager would have liked you to believe, but in an indefinite street in Cockneydom, so like its mates that, in the words of Folly herself, she had to have the homing instinct of a pigeon to find it at all.  Folly’s original name had been—­but why give it away?  She was one of those women who are above and beyond a name—­of a class, or, rather, of a type that a relatively merciful world produces sparingly.  She was all body and no soul.

From the moment that Lewis kissed Folly, and then kissed her several times more, discovering with each essay depths in the art which even his free and easy life had never given him occasion to dream of, he became infatuated—­so infatuated that the following dialogue passed over him and did not wake him.

“Why are you crying?” asked Lewis, whom tears had never before made curious.

“I’m crying,” gasped Folly, stamping her little foot, “because it’s taken so long!”

Lewis looked down at her brown head, buried against his shoulder, and asked dreamily: