“I’m not sure about the curse,” she answered, “but Gerty’s heroes and mine are rarely the same, you know.”

“Then, I suppose, it’s virtue that you are after,” he remarked.

She looked gravely up at him before she bowed her head in assent.  “I like virtue,” she responded quietly.  “Don’t you?”

“God knows, I do,” he replied without hesitation in the grandiloquent tone he loved to assume upon occasions.  “But do you think,” he added presently, “that a man can acquire virtue unless it has been born in him?”

“I think it is another name for wisdom,” she replied, “and that is often found late and in hard places.”

He looked at her with an attention which had become absorbed, exclusive.  “Do you know, I thought virtue was what women didn’t care about in men?” he said, and his voice was tense with curiosity.

“Perhaps you mistake the conventions for virtue,” she rejoined; “men usually do.”  Then after a moment she added frankly, “But I know very little of what women like or don’t like.  I’ve never really known but two besides my aunts—­and one of these is Gerty.”

“And you are very fond of Gerty?” he enquired.

As she looked up at him it seemed to him that her smile was a miracle of light.  “I love her more than anyone in the whole world,” she said.

Again she perplexed him, and with each fresh perplexity he was conscious of an increasing desire to understand.  “But I thought all women hated one another,” he observed.

“That’s because men have ruled the world in two ways,” she returned, and her protest was not without a smothered indignation; “they have made the laws and they have made the jokes.”

Her championship of her sex amused even while it attracted him—­he saw in it a kind of abstract honour which he had always believed to be lacking in the feminine mind—­and at the same instant he remembered the rancorous jealousy which had controlled Madame Alta’s relations with other women, the petty stings he had seen dealt at Gerty by her less lovely acquaintances, and the thousand small insincerities he heard around him every day.  The very enthusiasm with which she spoke, the intensity in her face, the decision in her voice, impressed him in a manner for which he was utterly unprepared.  In the world in which he moved an enthusiasm which was not at the same time an affectation would have appeared awkwardly out of place.  Women whom he knew were vivaciously excited over their winnings or losses at bridge whist, but he could not recall that he had ever seen a single one of them stirred to utterance by any impersonal question of injustice.  To be sure there were charitable ones among them, he supposed, but he had always tended by a kind of natural selection toward the conspicuously fair, and the conspicuously fair had proved invariably to be the secretly selfish as well.  His social life appeared to him now, as he walked by Laura’s side, to have been devoid of sincerity as of intelligence, and he recalled with disgust the exquisite empty voice of Madame Alta, her lyric sensuality, and the grossness of her affairs with her many lovers.  Was it the after taste of bitterness in his “wine and honey” which caused it to turn suddenly nauseous in his remembrance?