“And how much did you get for the garments you had worn twice, and then seen them suddenly grow aged in their extreme youth?”

“Ruddy, do not be nasty—­or scornful.  I’ve always worn my gowns more than twice—­some of them a great many times, except when I detested them.  And anyhow, the premature death of a gown is very, very good for trade.  That influences many ladies, of course.”

He burst out laughing, but there was a satirical note in the gaiety, or something still harsher.

“‘We deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us,’” he answered.  “It’s all such a hollow make-believe.”

“What is?”

She gazed at him inquiringly, for this mood was new to her.  She was vaguely conscious of some sort of change in him—­not exactly toward her, but a change, nevertheless.

“The life we rich people lead is a hollow make-believe, Jasmine,” he said, with sudden earnestness.  “I don’t know what’s the matter, but we’re not getting out of life all we ought to get; and we’re not putting into it all we ought to put in.  There’s a sense of emptiness—­of famine somewhere.”

He caught the reflection of his face in the glass again, and his brow contracted.  “We get sordid and sodden, and we lose the proportions of life.  I wanted Dick Wilberforce to do something with me the other day, and he declined.  ‘Why, my dear fellow,’ I said, ’you know you want to do it?’ ‘Of course I do,’ he answered, ’but I can’t afford that kind of thing, and you know it.’  Well, I did know it, but I had forgotten.  I was only thinking of what I myself could afford to do.  I was setting up my own financial standard, and was forgetting the other fellows who hadn’t my standard.  What’s the result?  We drift apart, Wilberforce and I—­well, I mean Wilberforce as a type.  We drift into sets of people who can afford to do certain things, and we leave such a lot of people behind that we ought to have clung to, and that we would have clung to, if we hadn’t been so much thinking of ourselves, or been so soddenly selfish.”

A rippling laugh rang through the room.  “Boanerges—­oh, Boanerges Byng!  ’Owever can you be so heloquent!”

Jasmine put both hands on his shoulders and looked up at him with that look which had fascinated him—­and so many others—­in their day.  The perfume which had intoxicated him in the first days of his love of her, and steeped his senses in the sap of youth and Eden, smote them again, here on the verge of the desert before him.  He suddenly caught her in his arms and pressed her to him almost roughly.

“You exquisite siren—­you siren of all time,” he said, with a note of joy in which there was, too, a stark cry of the soul.  He held her face back from him....  “If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand lovers, Jasmine.  Perhaps you did—­who knows!  And now you come down through the centuries purified by Time, to be my jasmine-flower.”