Zora laughed incredulously.

“You’ve accomplished half already, for you do look beautiful,” said the damsel.  “The other half is easy.”

“But if you haven’t much money to spend?”

“Spend somebody else’s.  Lord!  If I had your beauty I’d just walk down Wall Street and pick up a millionaire between my finger and thumb, and carry him off right away.”

When Zora suggested that life perhaps might have some deeper significance, the maiden answered: 

“Life is like the school child’s idea of a parable—­a heavenly story (if you’ve lots of money) with no earthly meaning.”

“Don’t you ever go down beneath the surface of things?” asked Zora.

“If you dig down far enough into the earth,” replied the damsel, “you come to water.  If you bore down deep enough into life you come to tears.  My dear, I’m going to dance on the surface and have a good time as long as I can.  And I guess you’re doing the same.”

“I suppose I am,” said Zora.  And she felt ashamed of herself.

At Washington fate gave her an opportunity of attaining the other half of the damsel’s idea.  An elderly senator of enormous wealth proposed marriage, and offered her half a dozen motor-cars, a few palaces and most of the two hemispheres.  She declined.

“If I were young, would you marry me?”

Zora’s beautiful shoulders gave the tiniest shrug of uncertainty.  Perhaps her young friend was right, and the command of the earth was worth the slight penalty of a husband.  She was tired and disheartened at finding herself no nearer to the heart of things than when she had left Nunsmere.  Her attitude toward the once unspeakable sex had imperceptibly changed.  She no longer blazed with indignation when a man made love to her.  She even found it more agreeable than looking at cataracts or lunching with ambassadors.  Sometimes she wondered why.  The senator she treated very tenderly.

“I don’t know.  How can I tell?” she said a moment or two after the shrug.

“My heart is young,” said he.

Zora met his eyes for the millionth part of a second and turned her head away, deeply sorry for him.  The woman’s instinctive look dealt instantaneous death to his hopes.  It was one more enactment of the tragedy of the bald head and the gray beard.  He spoke with pathetic bitterness.  Like Don Ruy Gomez da Silva in “Hernani,” he gave her to understand that now, when a young fellow passed him in the street, he would give up all his motor-cars and all his colossal canned-salmon business for the young fellow’s raven hair and bright eyes.

“Then you would love me.  I could make you.”

“What is love, after all?” asked Zora.

The elderly senator looked wistfully through the years over an infinite welter of salmon-tins, seeing nothing else.

“It’s the meaning of life,” said he.  “I’ve discovered it too late.”

He went away sorrowful, and Zora saw the vanity of great possessions.