Trent shook his head, while he held out his hand with a laugh.  “I won’t stay,” he answered; “I don’t like him.”

She looked up puzzled, her brows bent in an enquiring frown.  “Not like him!  Why, you’ve never met.”

“What has that to do with it?” he persisted lightly.  “One doesn’t have to meet a man to hate him.”

“One does unless one’s a person of stupid prejudices.”

“Well, maybe I am,” he admitted, “but I have my side.”

As the portieres were drawn back, he turned hastily away, to come face to face with Gerty’s caller the next instant upon the threshold.  Keen as his curiosity was he took in, at his brief glance, only that Kemper presented a bright and brave appearance and walked with a peculiarly energetic step.

CHAPTER VII

THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE

Gerty was leaning forward among her cushions and as her visitor approached she held out her hand, still faintly scented with cigarettes.  “Will you have coffee,” she asked, “or shall I ring for tea?”

He sat down in the chair from which Trent had risen and replied with a gesture of happy physical exhaustion.  “Let me have some coffee,” he answered, “I’ve been out golfing all the morning, and if you don’t prove mentally stimulating I shall fall asleep before you.  How many holes do you think I played to-day?”

Gerty shrugged her shoulders over the little coffee pot.  “I don’t know and it doesn’t interest me,” she retorted.  “After six months of Europe do you still make a god of physical exertion?”

The genial irony of his smile flashed back at her, and his eyes, half quizzical, half searching, but wholly kind, wandered leisurely down her slender figure.  Even as he lazily sipped his coffee, with his closely clipped, rather large brown head lying against the chair-back, she was made to feel, not unpleasantly, the compelling animal magnetism—­the “personal quantity,” as she had called it—­that lay behind the masculine bluntness of manner he affected.  “Aren’t you rather tumbled?” he enquired, with an animated glance, and, though he was fond of boasting that he was the only man he knew who never flattered women, Gerty was conscious of a sudden flush and the pleased conviction that she must be looking her very best.  It was a trick of his, she knew, to flatter, as it were, by paradox, to deal with delicate inuendos and to compliment by pleasant contradiction.  She had not been a woman of the world without reaping the reward of knowledge, and now, as she leaned back and smiled brilliantly into his face, she knew that, despite the apparent abruptness of his beginning, they would descend inevitably to the play of personal suggestion.  His measure had been taken long ago, she told herself, and lay tucked away in the receptacle which contained the varied neatly labelled patterns of her masculine world; but at the same time she was perfectly aware that within five minutes he would pique afresh both her interest and her liking.  “You can’t warm yourself by fireworks,” she had once said to him, and a moment later had paused to wonder at the intrinsic meaning of a daring phrase which he had spoken.