Laura raised her eyes to his face, and he had again the sensation of looking into an unutterable personality.

“I’m glad you haven’t read them,” she rejoined, “for now you won’t be able to talk to me about them.”

“So you don’t like to have one talk about them?”

She met his question with direct simplicity.  “About my verse?  I shouldn’t like to have you do it.”

“And why not I?” he demanded, laughing.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she returned, her eyes lighting with the humour of her frankness, “can one explain?  But I’m perfectly sure that it’s not the kind of thing you’d like.  There’s no action in it.”

“So Gerty has told you that I’m a strenuous creature?”

“Perhaps.  I don’t remember.”  She turned to Gerty, looking down upon her with a tenderness that suffused her face with colour.  “What was it that you told me, dearest?”

“What did I tell you?” repeated Gerty, still clasping Laura’s hand.  “Oh, it must have been that he agrees with some dreadful person who said that poetry was the insanity of prose.”

Laura laughed as she glanced back at him, and he contrasted her deep contralto notes with Gerty’s flute-like soprano.

“Well, he may not be right, but he is with the majority,” she said.

Her indifference piqued him into the spirit of opposition, and he felt an immediate impulse to compel her reluctant interest—­to arouse her admiration of the very qualities she now disdained.

“Well, I take my poetry where I find it,” he rejoined, “and that’s mostly in life and not in books.”

From the quick turn of her head, the instant’s lifting of her emotional reserve, he saw that the words had arrested her imagination—­that for the first time since her entrance she had really taken in the fact of his existence as an individual.

“Then you are not with the majority, but you are right!” she exclaimed.

“Is it not possible to be both?” he asked, pleased almost more than he would admit by the quickening of her attention.

“I think not,” she answered seriously, “don’t you?”

“I never think,” he laughed with his eyes upon hers, “I live.”

The animation, which was like the glow from an inner illumination, shone in her face, and he thought, as Trent had thought before him, that her soul must burn like a golden flame within her—­a flame that reached toward life, knowledge and the veiled wonders of experience.

“And so would I if I were a man,” she said.

She rose, clasping the furs at her throat, then folding Gerty in her arms she kissed her cheek.

“I stopped for a moment to look at you, nothing more,” she confessed.  “It was a choice between looking at you and at the Rembrandt in the Metropolitan, and I chose you.”  As she held Gerty from her for an instant and then drew her into her embrace again, Kemper saw that her delight in her friend’s beauty was almost a rapture, that her friendship possessed something of a religious fervour.