He admitted that he thought it probable, and then turned to one of the callers who had spoken—­a handsome woman with gray hair, which produced an odd effect of being artificial.

“I wish I’d done nothing worse than try on clothes,” she observed, “but I’ve been to lunch with an old lover.”

“Poor dear,” murmured Gerty, compassionately, as she passed Trent a cup of coffee, “was he so cruel as to tell you you’d retained your youth?”

“He did worse,” sighed the handsome woman, “he assured me I hadn’t.”

“Well, he couldn’t have done more if he’d married you,” declared Gerty, with her gleeful cynicism.

“He was too brutally frank for a husband,” remarked a second caller as she sipped her coffee.  “You showed more discretion, Susie, than I gave you credit for.”

“Oh, you needn’t compliment me,” protested Susie; “in those days he hadn’t a penny.”

“Indeed! and now?”

“Now he has a great many, but he has attached to himself a wife, and I a husband.  Well, I can’t say honestly that I regret him,” she laughed, “for if he has lived down his poverty he hasn’t his passion for red—­he wore a red necktie.  Why is it,” she lamented generally to the group, “that the male mind leans inevitably toward violent colours?”

“Perhaps they appeal to the barbaric part of us,” suggested Trent, becoming suddenly at ease amid the battle of inanities.

“Have you a weakness for red, too, Mr. Trent?” enquired Gerty.

The sparkle in his eyes leaped out at her challenge.

“Only in the matter of hair,” he retorted boldly.

She regarded him intently for a moment, while he felt again as he had felt at Laura Wilde’s, not only her fascination—­her personal radiance—­but the conviction that she carried at heart a deep disgust, a heavy disenchantment, which her ostentatious gayety could not conceal.  Even her beauty gave back to him a suggestion of insincerity, and he wondered if the brightness of her hair and of her mouth was as artificial as her brilliant manner.  It was magnificent, but, after all, it was not nature.

“Because I warn you now,” she pursued, after the brief pause, “that if you bind your first play in red I shall refuse to read it.”

“You can’t escape on that ground,” rejoined Trent, “I’ll make it green.”

“Well, you’re more civilised than Perry,” declared Gerty, with one of her relapses into defiant ridicule, which caused Trent to wonder if she were not acting upon an intuition which taught her that a slight shock is pleasantly stimulating to the fancy, “and I suppose it’s my association with him that convinces me if we’d leave your sex alone it would finally revert to the savage state and to skin girdles.”

“Now don’t you think Perry would look rather nice in skins?” enquired the handsome woman.  “I can quite see him with his club like the man in—­which one of Wagner’s?”

“It isn’t the club of the savage I object to,” coolly protested Gerty, “it’s the taste.  Perry has been married to me five years,” she continued, reflectively, “a long enough period you would think to teach even a Red Indian that my hair positively shrieks at anything remotely resembling pink.  Yet when I went to the Hot Springs last autumn he actually had this room hung for me in terra-cotta.”