She nodded, keeping her eyes still on him. He guessed at once of what she was thinking.

"Do anything--is rather vague," he replied evasively. "What sort of thing?"

Suddenly she threw off all reserve and let her temper go.

"If an angel were striving with a common American, do you mean to tell me you don't know which would go to the wall in our world?" she cried.

"Robin, you may be a thousand things, but you aren't a fool. Nor am I--not _au fond_. And yet I have thought--I have wondered--"

She stopped.

"What?" he asked.

"Whether, if there is an angel in me, it mightn't be as well to trot it out."

The self-consciousness of the slang prevented him from hating it.

"Ah!" he said. "When have you wondered?"

"Lately. It's your fault. You have insisted so much upon the existence of the celestial being that at last I've become almost credulous. It's very absurd and I'm still hanging back."

"Call credulity belief and you needn't be ashamed of it."

"And if I believe, what then?"

"Then a thousand things. Belief sheds strength through all the tissues of the mind, the heart, the temperament. Disbelief sheds weakness. The one knits together, the other dissolves."

"There are people who think angels frightfully boring company."

"I know."

"Well then?"

Suddenly Robin got up and spoke almost brutally.

"Do you think I don't see that you are trying to find out from me what I think would be the best means of--"

The look in her face stopped him.

"I think the water is boiling," he said, going over to the lamp.

"It ought to bubble," she answered quietly.

He lifted up the lid of the silver bowl and peeped in.

"It is bubbling."

For a moment he was busy pouring the water into the teapot. While he did this there was a silence between them. Lady Holme got up from the sofa and walked about the room. When she came to the "_Danseuse de Tunisie_"

she stopped in front of it.

"How strange that fan is," she said.

Robin shut the lid of the teapot and came over to her.

"Do you like it?"

"The fan?"

"The whole thing?"

"It's lovely, but I fancy it would have been lovelier without the fan."

"Why?"

She considered, holding her head slightly on one side and half closing her eyes.

"The woman's of eternity, but the fan's of a day," she said presently.

"It belittles her, I think. It makes her _chic_ when she might have been--"

She stopped.

"Throw away your fan!" he said in a low, eager voice.

"I?"

"Yes. Be the woman, the eternal woman. You've never been her yet, but you could be. Now is the moment. You're unhappy."

"No," she said sharply.

"Yes, you are. Viola, don't imagine I can't understand. You care for him and he's hurting you--hurting you by being just himself, all he can ever be. It's the fan he cares for."

"And you tell me to throw it away!"

She spoke with sudden passion. They stood still for a moment in front of the statuette, looking at each other silently. Then Robin said, with a sort of bitter surprise:

"But you can't love him like that!"

"I do."

It gave her an odd, sharp pleasure to speak the truth to him.

"What are you going to do, then?" he asked, after a pause.

He spoke without emotion, accepting the situation.

"To do? What do you mean?"

"Come and sit down. I'll tell you."