“I have only one amusement,” he said.

“What?”

“Painting.”

“And your model,” she nodded with a short laugh.  “Don’t forget her.  Your pretences are becoming tiresome, Duane.  Your pretty model, Mrs. Dysart, poses less than you do.”

Another wave of heart-sickness and anger swept over her; she felt the tears burning close to her lids and turned sharply on him: 

“It’s all rotten, I tell you—­the whole personnel and routine—­these people, and their petty vices and their idleness and their money!  I—­I do want to keep myself above it—­clean of it—­but what am I to do?  One can’t live without friends.  If I don’t gamble I’m left alone; if I don’t flirt I’m isolated.  If one stands aloof from everything one’s friends go elsewhere.  What can I do?”

“Make decent friends.  I’m going to.”

He bent forward and struck his knee with his closed fist.

“I’m going to,” he repeated.  “I’ve waited as long as I can for you to stand by me.  I could have even remained among these harmless simians if you had cared for me.  You’re all the friend I need.  But you’ve become one of them.  It isn’t in you to take an intelligent interest in me, or in what I care for.  I’ve stood this sort of existence long enough.  Now I’m all through with it.”

She stared.  Anger, astonishment, exasperation moved her in turn.  Bitterness unlocked her lips.

“Are you expecting to take Mrs. Dysart with you to your intellectual solitude?”

“I would if I—­if we cared for each other,” he said, calmly seating himself.

She said, revolted:  “Can’t you even admit that you are in love with her?  Must I confess that I could not avoid seeing you with her in her own room—­half an hour since?  Will that wring the truth out of you?”

“Oh, is that what you mean?” he said wearily.  “I believe the door was open....  Well, Geraldine, whatever you saw won’t harm anybody.  So come to your own conclusions....  But I wish you were out of all this—­with your fine insight and your clear intelligence, and your sweetness—­oh, the chances for happiness you and I might have had!”

“A slim chance with you!” she said.

“Every chance; perhaps the only chance we’ll ever have.  And we’ve missed it.”

“We’ve missed nothing”—­a sudden and curious tremor set her heart and pulses beating heavily—­“I tell you, Duane, it doesn’t matter whom people of our sort marry because we’ll always sicken of our bargain.  What chance for happiness would I run with such a man as you?  Or you with a girl like me?”

She lay back among the cushions, with a tired little laugh.  “We are like the others of our rotten sort, only less aged, less experienced.  But we have, each of us, our own heritage, our own secret depravity.”  She hesitated, reddening, caught his eye, stammered her sentence to a finish and flinched, crimsoning to the roots of her hair.