"Strelsa likes you," she said.

"With all the ardour and devotion of a fish," he returned, coolly.

"Rix?"

"What?"

"Do you know," said Molly, thoughtfully, "she _is_ a sort of a fish. She has the emotions of a mollusc as far as your s.e.x is concerned. Some women _are_ that way--more women than men would care to believe.... Do you know, Ricky, if you'll let us alone, it is quite natural for us to remain indifferent to considerations of that sort?"

She stood watching the young fellow busy with his pipe.

"It's only when you keep at us long enough that we respond," she said.

"Some of us are quickly responsive; it takes many of us a long while to catch fire. Threatened emotion instinctively repels many of us--the more fastidious among us, the finer grained and more delicately nerved, are essentially reserved. Modesty, pride, a natural aloofness, are as much a part of many women as their noses and fingers----"

"What becomes of modesty and pride when a girl marries for money?" he asked coolly.

"Some women can give and accept in cold blood what it would be impossible for them to accord to a more intimate and emotional demand."

"No doubt an ethical distinction," he said, "but not very clear to me."

"I did not argue that such women are admirable or excusable.... But how many modern marriages in our particular vicinity are marriages of inclination, Ricky?"

"You're a washed-out lot," he said--"you're satiated as schoolgirls. If you have any emotions left they're twisted ones by the time you are introduced. Most debutantes of your sort make their bow equipped for business, and with the experience of what, practically, has amounted to several seasons.

"If any old-fashioned young girls remain in your orbit I don't know where to find them. Why, do you suppose any young girl, not yet out, would bother to go to a party of any sort where there was not champagne and a theatre-box and a supper in prospect? That's a fine comment on your children, Molly, but you know it's true and so does everybody who pretends to know anything about it."

"You talk like Karl Westguard," she said, laughing. "Anyway, what has all this to do with you and Strelsa Leeds?"

"Nothing." He shrugged. "She is part of your last word in social civilisation----"

"She is a very normal, sensitive, proud girl, who has known little except unhappiness all her life, Rix--including two years of marital misery--two years of horror.--And you forget that those two years were the result of a demand purely and brutally emotional--to which, a novice, utterly ignorant, she yielded--pushed on by her mother....

Please be fair to her; remember that her childhood was pinched with poverty, that her girlhood in school was a lonely one, embarra.s.sed by lack of everything which her fashionable schoolmates had as matters of course.

"She could not go to the homes of her schoolmates in vacation times, because she could not ask them, in turn, to her own. She was still in school when Reggie Leeds saw her--and misbehaved--and the poor little thing was sent home, guiltless but already half-d.a.m.ned. No wonder her mother chased Reggie Leeds half around the world dragging her daughter by the wrist!"

"Did it make matters any better to force that drunken cad into a marriage?" asked Quarren coldly.

"It makes another marriage possible for Strelsa."

Quarren gazed out across the country where a fine misty rain was still falling. Acres of clover stretched away silvered with powdery moisture; robins and bluebirds covered the soaked lawns, and their excited call-notes prophesied blue skies.

"It doesn't make any difference one way or the other," said Quarren, half to himself. "She will go on in the predestined orbit----"

"Not if a stronger body pulls her out of it."

"There is nothing to which she responds--except what I have not."

"Make what you do possess more powerful, then."

"What do I possess?"

"Kindness. And also manhood, Ricky. Don't you?"

"Perhaps so--now--after a fashion.... But I am not the man who could ever attract her----"

"Wake her, and find out."

"Wake her?"

"Didn't I tell you that many of us are asleep, and that few of us awake easily? Didn't I tell you that n.o.body likes to be awakened from the warm comfort and idle security of emotionless slumber?--that it is the instinct of many of us to resist--just as I hear my maid speak to me in the morning and then turn over for another forty winks, hating her!"

They both laughed.

"My maid has instructions to persist until I respond," said Molly.

"Those are my instructions to you, also."

"Suppose, after all, I were knocking at the door of an empty room?"

"You must take your chances of course."

There was a noise of horses on the gravel: Langly cantered up on a handsome hunter followed by a mounted groom leading Strelsa's mare.

Sprowl dismounted and came up to pay his respects to Molly, scarcely troubling himself to recognise Quarren's presence, and turning his back to him immediately, although Molly twice attempted to include him in the conversation.

Strelsa in the library, pulling on her gloves, was silent witness to a pantomime unmistakable; but her pretty lips merely pressed each other tighter, and she sauntered out, crop under one arm, with a careless greeting to Langly.

He came up offering his hand and she took it, then stood a moment in desultory conversation, facing the others so as to include Quarren.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Strelsa in the library, pulling on her gloves, was silent witness to a pantomime unmistakable."]

"I thought I overheard you say to Molly that you were going back to town this afternoon," she remarked, casting a brief glance in his direction.

"I think I'd better go," he said, pleasantly.

"A matter of business I suppose?" eyebrows slightly lifted.

"In a way. Dankmere is alone, poor fellow."

Molly laughed:

"It is not good for man to be alone."

Sprowl said:

"There's a housemaid in my employ--she's saved something I understand.

You might notify Dankmere--" he half wheeled toward Quarren, eyes slightly bulging without a shadow of expression on his sleek, narrow face.

Molly flushed; Quarren glanced at Sprowl, amazed at his insolence out of a clear sky.