“Well, I was once in love with her,” he said bluntly.

She made an indifferent gesture.

“And now I hate her,” he added with a sharp intonation.

“Is that the ordinary end of your romances?” she questioned without interest.

“It wasn’t romance,” he replied bitterly; “it was hell.”

Again she caught the note of satiety in his voice, and it stirred her to a feeling of sympathy which she despised in herself.

“At least you worked out your own damnation,” she returned coolly.

“One usually does,” he admitted.  “That’s the infernal part of it.  But I’m out of it now,” he pursued with an egoism which rejoiced in its own strength.  “I’m out of it now with a whole skin and I hope to keep decent even if I don’t get to heaven.  You might not think it,” he concluded gravely, “but I’m at bottom as religious a chap as old John Knox.”

“You may be,” she observed without enthusiasm, “but it’s the kind of religion which impresses me not at all.”

“Well, it might have been better,” he said, “but I never had a chance.  I’ve known such devilish women all my life.”

Humour shone in her eyes, making her whole face darkly brilliant with expression.  “Do you know that you show a decided family resemblance to Adam,” she observed.

“It does sound that way,” he laughed, “but there’s some hard sense in it, after all.  A woman has a tremendous effect on a man’s life—­I mean the woman he really likes.”

“Wouldn’t it be safer to say the ’women’?” she suggested.

“Nonsense.  I was only joking.  There is always one who is more than the others—­any man will tell you that.”

“I suppose any man will—­even Perry Bridewell.”

“Why not Perry?” he demanded.  “You can’t imagine how he used to bore the life out of me about Gerty—­but Gerty, you know,” he added in a burst of confidence which impressed her as almost childlike, “isn’t exactly the kind of woman to a—­a lift a fellow.”

Before his growing earnestness she resorted quickly to the defence of flippancy.  “Nor is Perry, I suppose, exactly the kind of man that is lifted,” she observed, with a laugh.

He looked at her a moment with a smile which had even then an edge of his characteristic genial irony.  “You are the sort of woman who could do that,” he said abruptly.

“Could lift Perry?  Now, God forbid!” she retorted gayly.

“Oh, Perry be hanged!” he exclaimed, with the candid ill-humour which, strangely enough, had a peculiar attraction for her.  “If I had known you fifteen years ago I might be a good deal nearer heaven than I am to-day.”

The charm of his earnestness was very great, and she felt that the sudden sensation of faintness which came over her must be visible in her fluttering eyelids and in her trembling hands.

“I haven’t faith in a salvation that must be worked out by somebody else,” she said, in a voice she made cold by an effort to render it merely careless.