She looked up still smiling, and he watched her large, beautiful forehead, on which the firelight played as on a mirror.  “Well, one’s friends do add zest to the pleasure,” she returned.

For a moment he hesitated; then leaning forward he spoke with a desperate resolve.  “One’s friends—­yes—­but you have been more than a friend to me since the beginning—­since the first day.  You have been everything.  I could not have lived without you.”

He saw her curved brows draw quickly together, and she bent upon him a look in which he read pity, surprise and a slight tinge of amusement.  “Oh, you poor boy, is it possible that you imagine all this?” she asked.

“I imagine nothing,” he answered with a wounded and despairing indignation, “but I have loved you—­I have dreamed of you—­I have lived for you since the first moment that I saw you.”

“Then you have been behaving very foolishly,” she commented, “for what you are in love with is a shadow—­a poem, a fancy that isn’t myself at all.  The real truth is,” she pursued, with a decision which cut him to the heart, “that you are in love with a literary reputation and you imagine that it’s a woman.  Why, I’m not only older than you in years, I’m older in soul, older in a thousand lives.  There is nothing foolish about me, nothing pink and white and fleshly perfect—­nothing that a boy like you could hold to for a day—­”

She broke off and sat staring into the fire with a troubled and brooding look—­a look which seemed to lose the fact of his presence in some more absorbing vision at which she gazed.  He noticed even in his misery that she had suffered during the last few weeks an obscure, a mysterious change—­it was as if the flame-like suggestion, which had always belonged to her personality, had of late gathered warmth, light, effectiveness, consuming, as it strengthened, whatever had been passive or without definite purpose in her nature.  Her face seemed to him more than ever to be without significance judged by a purely physical standard—­more than ever he felt it to be but a delicate and sympathetic medium for the expression of some radiant quality of soul.

“I did not know—­I would not have believed that you could be so cruel,” he protested with bitterness.

“I can be anything,” she answered slowly, drawing her gaze with an effort from the fire.  “Most women can.”

The glory of the morning passed from him as suddenly as it had come, and he told himself with the uncompromising desperation of youth that for all he cared now his great play might remain forever in oblivion.  Life itself appeared as empty—­as futile as his ambition—­so empty, indeed, that he began immediately in the elastic melancholy which comes easily at twenty-five—­to plan the consoling details of an early death.  When he remembered his buoyant happiness of a few hours ago it seemed to him almost ridiculous, and he experienced a curious sensation of detachment, of having drifted out of his proper