Jacqueline raised herself from her crouching position, the more easily to gratify her curiosity.

“It is extraordinary—­the change!” she murmured.  “Extraordinary!  Madame, let us complete it!  Let us remove that ugly coat!” Excitedly, and without permission, she began to free Max of the boy’s coat, while Max yielded with a certain passive excitement.  “And, now, what can we find to substitute?  Ah!” She gave a cry of delight and ran to the bed, over the foot of which was thrown a faded gold scarf—­a strip of rich fabric such as artists delight in, for which Max had bargained only the day before in the rue Andre de Sarte.

“Now the tie!  And the ugly collar!” She ran back, the scarf floating from her arm; and Max, still passive, still held mute by conflicting sensations, suffered the light fingers to unloose the wide black tie, to remove the collar, to open a button or two of the shirt.

“And now the hair!” With lightning-like dexterity, Jacqueline drew a handful of hairpins from her own head, reduced her short blonde curls to confusion, and in a moment had brushed the thick waves of Max’s clipped hair upward and secured them into a firm foundation.

“Now!  Now, madame!  Close your eyes!  I am the magician!”

Max’s eyes closed, and the illusion of dead hours rose again, more vivid, more poignant than before.  With the familiar sensation of deft fingers at work upon the business of hairdressing, a thousand recollections of countless nights and mornings—­countless preparations and wearinesses—­countless anticipations and disgusts, born with the placing of each hairpin, the coiling of the unfamiliar—­familiar—­weight of hair.

“Now, madame!  Is it not a picture?”

With the gesture and pride of an artist, Jacqueline cast the wide scarf round Max’s shoulders and stepped back.

Max’s eyes opened, gazing straight into the mirror, and once again in that night of contrasts, emotion rose paramount.

It was most truly a picture; not the earlier, puzzling sketch—­the anomalous mingling of sex—­but the complete semblance of the woman—­the slim neck rising from the golden folds, the proud head, seeming smaller under its coiled hair than it had ever appeared in the untidiness of its boy’s locks.

“And now, madame, tell me!  Is the evil spirit one lightly to be dismissed?”

All the woman in the little Jacqueline—­the creature of eternal tradition, eternal intrigue—­was glorying in her handiwork, in the consciousness of its potency.

But Max never answered; Max continued to stare into the glass.

“You will dismiss it, madame?”

Max still stared, a peculiar light of thought shining and wavering in the gray eyes.

“Madame, you will dismiss it?”

Max turned slowly.

“I will do more, Jacqueline.  I will destroy it utterly.”

“Madame!”

“I have a great idea.”