life, the best of love, the best of endeavour and achievement.  She had missed the finer reality.  From somewhere, from the past or the present, from the dream or the actuality, her young illusions and her young longings rushed over her, driven by the fragrance of the lilacs, which was stinging her blood into revolt.  Only an instant the revolt lasted, but in that instant of vision nothing mattered in life except romance, enchantment, adventure.

“Yes, I’ve missed life,” she thought, and the regret was still in her mind when one of those miracles which in our ignorance we call accidents occurred.  Out of the lilac-scented twilight, out of the wild, sweet spirit of spring, a voice said in her ear, “Alice, you waited!”

Turning quickly, she had a vivid impression of height, breadth, bigness, of roughened dark red hair, of gray eyes so clean that they looked ’as if they had been washed by the sea.  Then the voice spoke again:  “I beg your pardon.  It was a mistake.”  And the next instant she was alone in the street.

CHAPTER VI

DISCOVERIES

“Who is Alice?” she wondered on her way home, “and for whom was she waiting?” A shopgirl perhaps, and he was, probably—­not a clerk in a shop—­he looked more like a mechanic—­but hardly a gentleman.  Not, at any rate, what her mother or Jane would call a gentleman—­not the kind of gentleman that George was, or Charley Gracey, for instance.  He was doubtless devoid of those noble traditions by and through which, her mother had always told her, a gentleman was made out of a man—­the traditions which had created Arthur and Cousin Jimmy as surely as they had created George and Charley.  “I wonder what tradition really amounts to?” she thought, while she stood on the rear platform of a Harlem train, grasping the handle of the door as the car swung round a curve.  “All my life, I have been getting farther away from it—­a woman has to, I suppose, when she works—­and if I get away from it myself how can I honestly hold to it for men, who, according to mother, can’t be gentlemen without it?” Then reverting to her first question, she resumed musingly:  “Who is Alice?  It would be rather amusing to be Alice for one evening, and to find out what it means to be loved by a man like that, even if he isn’t a gentleman.  He was, I think, the cleanest creature I ever saw, and it wasn’t just the cleanness of soap and water—­it went deeper than that.  It was the cleanness of the winds and the sea—­as if his eyes had been washed by the sea.  I wonder who Alice is?  A common little shopgirl probably from Sixth Avenue, with padded hair and painted lips, and smelling of cheap powder.  That’s just the kind of girl to fascinate a big, strong, simple creature like that Yes, of course, Alice is cheap and tawdry and vulgar, with no substance to her mind.”  She tried to think of Arthur, but her mental image of him had become as thin and unsubstantial as a shadow.