“Yes, she married.  After my father’s death she went to my aunt in Petersburg, and there she forgot both nature and art—­and me.”

“And who was the man she married?”

Max shrugged his shoulders to the ears.  “Does it serve any purpose to relate?  He was very charming, very accomplished; how was my sister, at eighteen, to know that he was also very callous, very profligate, very cruel?  These things happen every day in every country!”

“Did she love him?” Blake was leaning forward in his chair; he had forgotten to keep his cigar alight.

“Love him?” With a vehemence electric as it was unheralded, Max’s voice altered; with the passionate changefulness of the Russian, indifference was swept aside, emotion gushed forth.  “Love him?  Yes, she loved him—­she, who was as proud as God!  She loved him so that all her pride left her—­all the high courage of my father left her—­”

“And he—­the man, the husband?”

“The man?” Max laughed a short, bitter laugh unsuggestive of himself.  “The man did what every man does, my friend, when a woman lies down beneath his feet—­he spurned her away.”

“But, my God, a creature like that!”

Again Max laughed.  “Yes!  That is what you all say of the woman who is not beneath your own heel!  You wonder why I disapprove of love.  That is the reason of my disapproval—­the story of my sister Maxine!  Maxine who was as fine and free as a young animal, until love snared her and its instrument crushed her.”

“But the man—­the husband?” said Blake again.

“The man?  The man followed the common way, dragging her with him—­step by step, step by step—­down the sickening road of disillusionment—­down that steep, steep road that is bitter as the Way of the Cross!”

“Boy!”

“I shock you?  You have not travelled that road!  You have not seen the morass at the bottom!  You have not seen the creature you loved stripped of every garment that you wove—­as has my sister Maxine!  You do well to be shocked.  You have not been left with a scar upon your heart; you have not viewed the last black picture of all—­the picture of your beloved as a dead thing—­dead over some affair of passion so sordid that even horror turns to disgust.  You do well to be shocked!”

“Dead?” repeated Blake, caught by the sound of the word.  “He died, then?”

“He killed himself.”  Max laughed harshly.  “Killed himself when all the wrong was done!”

“And your sister?  Your sister?  Where did she go—­what did she do?”

“What does a woman do when she is thrown up like wreckage after the storm?”

“She does as her temperament directs.  I think your sister would go back to nature—­to the great and simple things.”

With a tense swiftness the boy turned from his fixed contemplation of the sky, his glance flashing upon Blake.

“One must be naked and whole to go back to nature!  One fears nature when one is wreckage from the storm!”