“I’d like to be able to play!” she said.

“You can learn,” he told her.

“I’m too old!”

He laughed.  And as he sat smoking his eyes followed her ceaselessly.

Above the sofa hung a large print of the Circus Maximus, with crowded tiers mounting toward the sky, and awninged boxes where sat the Vestal Virgins and the Emperor high above a motley, serried group on the sand.  At the mouth of a tunnel a lion stood motionless, menacing, regarding them.  The picture fascinated Janet.

“It’s meant to be Rome, isn’t it?” she asked.

“What?  That?  I guess so.”  He got up and came over to her.  “Sure,” he said.  “I’m not very strong on history, but I read a book once, a novel, which told how those old fellows used to like to see Christians thrown to the lions just as we like to see football games.  I’ll get the book again—­we’ll read it together.”

Janet shivered....  “Here’s another picture,” he said, turning to the other side of the room.  It was, apparently, an engraved copy of a modern portrait, of a woman in evening dress with shapely arms and throat and a small, aristocratic head.  Around her neck was hung a heavy rope of pearls.

“Isn’t she beautiful!” Janet sighed.

“Beautiful!” He led her to the mirror.  “Look!” he said.  “I’ll buy you pearls, Janet, I want to see them gleaming against your skin.  She can’t compare to you.  I’ll—­I’ll drape you with pearls.”

“No, no,” she cried.  “I don’t want them, Claude.  I don’t want them.  Please!” She scarcely knew what she was saying.  And as she drew away from him her hands went out, were pressed together with an imploring, supplicating gesture.  He seized them.  His nearness was suffocating her, she flung herself into his arms, and their lips met in a long, swooning kiss.  She began instinctively but vainly to struggle, not against him —­but against a primal thing stronger than herself, stronger than he, stronger than codes and conventions and institutions, which yet she craved fiercely as her being’s fulfilment.  It was sweeping them dizzily —­whither?  The sheer sweetness and terror of it!

“Don’t, don’t!” she murmured desperately.  “You mustn’t!”

“Janet—­we’re going to be married, sweetheart,—­just as soon as we can.  Won’t you trust me?  For God’s sake, don’t be cruel.  You’re my wife, now—­”

His voice seemed to come from a great distance.  And from a great distance, too, her own in reply, drowned as by falling waters.

“Do you love me?—­will you love me always—­always?”

And he answered hoarsely, “Yes—­always—­I swear it, Janet.”  He had found her lips again, he was pulling her toward a door on the far side of the room, and suddenly, as he opened it, her resistance ceased....