“I hate you when you are like this,” she exclaimed, almost indignantly.

“A woman always hates a man when he tells her the truth,” he retorted.  “She has a taste for sweets and prefers falsehood.”

“It may be the truth as you have seen it,” she answered, “but that after all is a very small part of the whole.”

“It’s big enough at least to be unpleasant.”

“Well, it’s your personal idea of the truth, all the same,” she insisted, “and you can’t make it universal.  It isn’t Gerty’s for instance.”

“You think not?” he made a face of playful astonishment.  “Well, how about its hitting off our friend Perry?”

“Perry!” she replied disdainfully.  “Do you know if he weren’t so simple, I’d detest him.”

“But why?” His eyebrows were still elevated.

“Because he thinks of nothing under the sun but the sensations of his great big body.”

“Well, that may not be magnificent,” he paraphrased gayly, “but it is man.”

“Then, thank heaven, it isn’t woman!” she exclaimed.

“Do you mean to tell me,” he leaned forward in his chair and she was conscious suddenly that he was very close to her—­closer, in spite of the intervening space, than any man had ever been in her life before, “do you honestly mean to tell me that women are different?”

The expression of his face altered as it always did before an approaching change in his mood, and she saw in it something of the satiety—­the moral weariness—­which is the Nemesis of the soul that is led by pleasure.  It was at this moment that she felt an exquisite confidence in the man himself—­in the man hidden behind the cynicism, the affectation, the utter vanity of words.

“Oh, they can’t devote themselves to their own sensations when they have to think so much of other people’s,” she responded merrily; and she felt again the strange impulse of retreat, the prompting to fly before the earnestness that appeared in his voice.  While he was flippant, her intuitions told her that she might be serious, but when the banter passed from his tone, she turned to it instinctively as to a defence.

“But those that I have known”—­he stopped and looked at her as if he weighed with an experienced eye the exact effect of his words.

She laughed, but it was a laugh of irritation rather than humour.  “Perhaps you did not select your examples very wisely,” she remarked.

Her look arrested him as he was about to reply, and he spoke evidently upon the impulse of the moment.  “Did Gerty tell you about Madame Alta?” he enquired.

She shook her head with an evasion of the question, “I don’t remember that it was Gerty.”

“But you have heard of her?”

“I’ve heard her,” she answered.  “It is a very beautiful voice.”

He frowned with a nervous irritation, and she saw from his impatient movements that he was under the influence of a disagreeable excitement.