“I never knew but one real man,” she told herself bitterly.  “I don’t even know that he was a real man.  I wonder if he is still alive.”  Once more she was in fancy a little girl, shyly twisting the toe of a rough shoe in the dust of the mountain roadside.  Once more she saw a pair of eyes that won the heart with their honesty and seemed willing to have other eyes look through them into a soul concealing nothing.  Though Jefferson Edwardes had been her first flatterer, he had flattered without ulterior motive.  She was a ragged child and he a rich young man who might have to die.  Suddenly she felt that the little girl who was once herself had been more admirable in every way than this polished woman who had succeeded her:  the woman who was everything that little girl had yearned to be and who stood self-revealed as brilliant and hard as one of her own purely decorative diamonds.

A small clock chimed, and, with a somewhat weary step, Mary Burton crossed the room and rang for her maid.

At dinner and later when the moon had risen and the guests danced on the smooth mosaic floor of an outdoor pavilion cunningly fashioned in the semblance of a Greek theater, her eyes were pools of laughter and her repartee was like wine sparkle—­for at least she had learned to act with the empty bravery of her world.

In the constant attendance of men who chattered compliments she felt a haunting sense of pursuit and a secret impulse for flight, so that at the first opportunity she slipped away for the relief of solitude.

There were many vine-embowered retreats about the place where those who did not wish to dance might talk softly in the blue shadows of Grecian urns with star-shine and moon-mist for their tete-a-tetes.  In such a place sat Mary Burton, alone—­looking about her for a means of more secure escape.  Her imagination kept disturbing her with the figure of a small girl whose home was a soon-to-be-abandoned farm.  A yearning possessed her for the one thing which she could not command, the sort of romance that sweeps one away like a torrent.  That little girl had yearned for the gifts of the world, for experience, wealth and adulation, because she fancied that out of these things came romance and its prize of happiness.  The woman had them all—­except the end of them all for which she had wanted them.  They were dulled and tarnished by satiety and she still craved the coming of a lover whose forceful wooing should frighten and dominate her.  Never in her life had she known any man upon whom she could not, with her trained self-reliance, set her own metes and bounds.  Surely somewhere in the world there must be the sort of love-making that wrenches a woman out of her perfect self-composure and bears her away on its flood tide of power and passion.  Perhaps she had been schooled and “finished” until humanity and its wonderful reality had, for her, ceased to exist.  Suddenly she felt an upflaming of resentment