“Oh, Laura, Laura!” she said softly.

With a cry of remorse Laura threw herself upon her knees beside the window, kissing the gloved hands in Gerty’s lap.

But Gerty had wiped her tears away and sat smiling her little worldly smile of knowledge.  “I am jealous of you, but not in the way you meant,” she answered.  “I am jealous for myself, for the one little bit of me that is really alive—­the part of myself that is in you.  I am afraid to go over again with you the old road that I went over with myself—­the old wanting, wanting, wanting that ends in nothing.”

“But why should I go over it?” asked Laura, from her knees, and the flush in her face coloured all her manner with a fine deception.

Gerty’s mocking gayety rang back into her voice.  “You might as well ask me why I am still fool enough to be in love with Perry,” she returned with her flippant laugh, “it’s a part of what Arnold calls ’the damnable contradiction of life.’  You might as well ask Connie Adams why she was born bad?”

“Was she—­and how do you know it?” demanded Laura.

“I don’t know.”  Gerty’s shrug was exquisitely indifferent.  “But it’s more charitable, I fancy, to suppose so.  Have you seen Roger, by the bye?”

Laura shook her head.  “I would rather not.  There is nothing one could say.”

“Oh, I don’t know—­one might congratulate him on his liberation, and that’s something.  I dare say he’ll have to get a divorce now, though Perry says he hates them.”

“Then I don’t believe he’ll do it, he doesn’t live by the ordinary ethics of the rest of us, you know.  Will she marry Brady, do you think?”

“Marry Brady?  My blessed innocent, Brady wouldn’t marry her.  He has about as much moral responsibility as a fig tree that puts forth thistles—­and besides who could blame him?  She’s half crazy already from cocaine, and no man on earth could stand her for a month.”

No man on earth!  Laura leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes, for she remembered the figure of Roger Adams as he moved away from her through the sunlight in the crowded street.  She saw his worn clothes, his resolute walk, and the patience which belonged to the infinite stillness in his face; and, for one breathless moment, she seemed to feel the approach of the spirit which worked silently amid the humming material things that made up life.

Gerty had risen and was fastening her white furs at her throat.  “I must go to Camille’s,” she said, “for she has just got in some new French gowns and she has promised to give me the first look.  Of course, one can’t really trust her,” she added suspiciously, “and I shouldn’t be in the least surprised to find that she’d let Ada Lawley get ahead of me.  It is simply marvellous how that woman always manages to produce a striking effect.  She was at the opera last night in peacock blue when every other woman was wearing that dead, lustreless white.  Do you know I sometimes wonder if I follow the fashion almost too closely.”