She shook her head with the piquant disdain he knew so well.  “Amusing himself doubtless,” she replied, adding with one of her uncontrollable flashes of impulse, “Do you, by the way, I wonder, ever happen to see Ada Lawley now?”

The question startled him, and he sat for a minute staring under bent brows at her indignant loveliness; though she had shrieked out her secret in the tongues of men and of angels, she could have added nothing further to his knowledge.  The wonderful child quality which still survived in her beneath all her shallow worldliness dawned suddenly in her wide-open, angry eyes, and he saw clearly at last the hidden canker which was eating at her impatient heart.  So this was what it meant, and this was why she had reminded him at times of a pierced butterfly that hides a mortal anguish beneath the beauty of its quivering wings?

“Oh, she isn’t exactly the kind to blush unseen, you know,” he responded lightly.

“But what is her attraction?  I can’t fathom it,” persisted Gerty, with a burning curiosity.  “Is it possible that men think her handsome?”

He laughed softly at her impatience, and then leaning back in his chair, took up her question in a quizzical tone.  “Is she handsome?  Well, that depends, I suppose, upon one’s natural or acquired taste.  Some people like caviar—­some don’t.”

Though she choked down her eagerness, he saw it still fluttering in her beautiful white throat.  “Then I may presume that she is caviar to the respectable?” she said with a relapse into her biting sarcasm.

He made a gesture of alarmed protest:  “You are to presume nothing—­it is never wise to presume against a woman.”

“Then I won’t if you’ll tell me,” she returned, “if you’ll tell me quite honestly and sincerely all that you think.”

Before the mockery in his eyes she fell back with a sigh of disappointment, but he answered the challenge presently in what she had once described as his “paradoxical humour.”

“Oh, well, my views have all been distant ones,” he said, “but I should judge her to be—­since you ask me—­a lady who insists upon a remarkable natural beauty with a decidedly artificial emphasis.”

He paused for a moment in order to enjoy the flavour of his epigram; but Gerty was too much in earnest to waste her animated attention upon words.

“Oh, of course she makes up,” she retorted, “they all do that—­men like it.”

His puzzling smile dwelt on her for an instant.  “Well, I’d rather a woman would be downright bad any day,” he said, “it shows less.”

“But is she bad?” asked Gerty, almost panting in her pursuit of information.  “That’s what I want to know—­of course she’s artificial on the face of it.”

“On the face of her, you mean,” he corrected, and concluded promptly, “but I’ve never said anything against a woman in my life and it’s too late to begin just as I’m getting bald.  Doesn’t it suffice that the Lady has kept her pipe tuned to the general melody?”