“You must give me time—­I must think before I let myself care too much,” she said.

In the end she gave him her promise and he went from her with a rare and vivid feeling of exhilaration.  For the time he told himself that he wanted her more than he remembered ever to have wanted anything in his whole life; and his sated emotion of a man of pleasure, responded with all the lost intensity of youth.  Was it credible that he was already middle-aged—­was already growing a little bald? he demanded, with a genuine delight in the discovery that his senses were still alive.

On his way up to his rooms, he dropped, by habit, into his club, and after a word or two with several men whom he seldom met, he crossed over to join Perry Bridewell, who sat in an exhausted attitude in a leather chair beside the window.  Outside a stream of carriages, containing richly dressed women moved up Fifth Avenue, dividing as it approached the mounted police at the corner, and Perry, as Kemper went up to him, was following with a dulled fish-like glance the pronounced figure of a lady who held the reins over a handsome pair of bays.

“That’s a fine figure of a woman—­look at her hips,” he observed, with relish, as Kemper stopped beside him.

“I saw her yesterday.  Gerty says she’s terrific form,” commented Kemper, gazing to where the object of their admiration vanished in a crush of vehicles.

“Oh, they always say that of a woman with any figure to speak of,” remarked Perry.  “Unless she’s as flat as an ironing board, somebody is sure to say she’s vulgar.  For my part I like shape,” he concluded with emphasis.

A vision of Gerty’s slender, almost boyish figure, with its daring carriage, rose before Kemper, and he bit back the cynical laugh upon his lips.  Did one require, after all, a certain restraint in life, a cultured abstinence before one could really appreciate the finer flavour of the aesthetic taste?  His old aversion to marriage returned to him as he looked at Perry, sunk in his domestic satiety, and his exhilaration of a moment ago gave place to a corresponding degree of depression.  He had done the irrevocable thing, and, as usual, it was no sooner irrevocable than the joyous seduction of it fled from his fancy.  Marriage was utterly repugnant to him, and yet he knew not only that there was no withdrawing from his position, but that he would not wish to withdraw himself if he had the power.  The instant that the possibility of losing Laura occurred to him, he felt again the full, resurgent wave of his desire.  He wanted her, and if to marry her was the one way to possess her, then—­the devil take it—­marry her he would!

A tinted note was brought to Perry Bridewell, who, after reading it, sat twirling it between his fingers with a bored and discontented look on his handsome florid face.

“Take my advice, and when you get clear of an affair, keep out,” he remarked, in a disgusted voice.  “By Jove, I’m sometimes tempted to wish that I were as cold blooded as old Adams.”