“Oh yes,” said Beaton.  “I didn’t know but what I once said of them might have prejudiced you against them.  I have accused myself of it.”  He always took a tone of conscientiousness, of self-censure, in talking with Miss Vance; he could not help it.

“Oh no.  And I never allowed myself to form any judgment of her.  She is very pretty, don’t you think, in a kind of way?”

“Very.”

“She has a beautiful brunette coloring:  that floury white and the delicate pink in it.  Her eyes are beautiful.”

“She’s graceful, too,” said Beaton.  “I’ve tried her in color; but I didn’t make it out.”

“I’ve wondered sometimes,” said Miss Vance, “whether that elusive quality you find in some people you try to paint doesn’t characterize them all through.  Miss Dryfoos might be ever so much finer and better than we would find out in the society way that seems the only way.”

“Perhaps,” said Beaton, gloomily; and he went away profoundly discouraged by this last analysis of Christine’s character.  The angelic imperviousness of Miss Vance to properties of which his own wickedness was so keenly aware in Christine might have made him laugh, if it had not been such a serious affair with him.  As it was, he smiled to think how very differently Alma Leighton would have judged her from Miss Vance’s premises.  He liked that clear vision of Alma’s even when it pierced his own disguises.  Yes, that was the light he had let die out, and it might have shone upon his path through life.  Beaton never felt so poignantly the disadvantage of having on any given occasion been wanting to his own interests through his self-love as in this.  He had no one to blame but himself for what had happened, but he blamed Alma for what might happen in the future because she shut out the way of retrieval and return.  When be thought of the attitude she had taken toward him, it seemed incredible, and he was always longing to give her a final chance to reverse her final judgment.  It appeared to him that the time had come for this now, if ever.

XV.

While we are still young we feel a kind of pride, a sort of fierce pleasure, in any important experience, such as we have read of or heard of in the lives of others, no matter how painful.  It was this pride, this pleasure, which Beaton now felt in realizing that the toils of fate were about him, that between him and a future of which Christine Dryfoos must be the genius there was nothing but the will, the mood, the fancy of a girl who had not given him the hope that either could ever again be in his favor.  He had nothing to trust to, in fact, but his knowledge that he had once had them all; she did not deny that; but neither did she conceal that he had flung away his power over them, and she had told him that they never could be his again.  A man knows that he can love and wholly cease to love, not once merely, but several times; he recognizes the fact in regard