ought to have proved quite final as regarded Alexander Quisanté. As a fact it would not leave her mind, it established an absolutely sure footing in her convictions; and yet it did not seem quite final in regard to Quisanté. Perhaps Dick Benyon would maintain the proud level of his remark about the genealogy, and remind her that somebody settled Napoleon's claims by the same verdict. But one did not meet Napoleon at little dinners, nor think of him with no countervailing achievements to his name.

Her mind was so full of the man that when she joined her mother at a party later in the evening, she had an absurd anticipation that everybody would talk to her about him. Nobody did; that evening an Arctic explorer and a new fortune-teller divided the attention of the polite; men came and discussed one or other of these subjects with her until she was weary. For once then, on Marchmont making an appearance near her, her legs did not carry her in the opposite direction; she awaited and even invited his approach; at least he would spare her the fashionable gossip, and she thought he might tell her something about Quisanté. In two words he told her, if not anything about Quisanté, still everything that he himself thought of Quisanté.

"I met Mr. Quisanté at dinner," she said.

"That fellow!" exclaimed Marchmont.

The tone was full of weariness and contempt; it qualified the man as unspeakable and dismissed him as intolerable. Was Marchmont infallible, as Fanny had said? At least he represented, in its finest and most authoritative form, the opinion of her own circle, the unhesitating judgment against which she must set herself if she became Quisanté's champion. It would be much easier, and probably much more sensible, to fall into line and acquiesce in the condemnation; then it would matter nothing whether the vulgar did or did not elect to admire Dick Benyon's peculiar friend. Yet a protest stirred within her; only her sense of the ludicrous prevented her from adopting Dick's word and asking Marchmont if he had ever seen the fellow in one of his "moments." But it would be absurd to catch up the phrase like that, and it was by no means certain that even the moments would appeal to Marchmont.

Looking round, she perceived that a little space in the crowded room had been left vacant about them; nobody came up to her, no woman, in passing by, signalled to Marchmont; the constant give-and-take of companions was suspended in their favour. In fine, people supposed that they wanted to talk to one another; it would not be guessed that one of the pair wished Quisanté to be the topic.

"He's got some brains," Marchmont went on, "though of rather a flashy sort, I think. Dick Benyon's been caught by them. But a more impossible person I never met. You don't like him?"

"Yes, I do," she answered defiantly. "At least I do every now and then."

"Pray make the occasions as rare as possible," he urged in his low lazy voice, with his pleasant smile and a confidential look in his handsome eyes. "And don't let them coincide with my presence."

"Really he won't hurt you; you're too particular."

"No, he won't hurt me, but I should feel rather as though he were hurting you."

"What do you mean?"

"By being near you, certainly by being anything in the least like a friend of yours."

"He'd defile me?" she asked, laughing.

"Yes," said he seriously; the next moment he smiled and shrugged his shoulders; he did not withdraw his seriousness but he apologised for it.

"Oh, I'd better get under a glass-case at once," she exclaimed, laughing again impatiently.

"Yes, and lock it, and——"

"Give you the key?"

He laughed as he said, "The most artistic emotions have some selfishness in them, I admit it."

"It would make a little variety if I sent a duplicate to Mr. Quisanté!"

Here he would not follow her in her banter. He grew grave and even frowned, but all he said was, "Really there are limits, you know." It was her own verdict, expressed more tersely, more completely, and more finally. There were limits, and Alexander Quisanté was beyond them; the barrier they raised could not be surmounted; he could not fly over it even on the wings of his moments.

"You above everybody oughtn't to know such people," Marchmont went on.

Now he was thinking of the type she was supposed to represent; that was the fashion in which it was appropriate to talk to the type.

"I'm not in the very least like that really," she assured him. "If you knew me better you'd find that out very soon."

"I'm willing to risk it."

Flirtation for flirtation—and this conversation was becoming one—there could be no comparison between Marchmont's and Quisanté's; the one was delightful, the other odious; the one combined charm with dignity; the other was a mixture of cringing and presumption. May put the contrast no less strongly than this as she yielded to the impulse of the minute and gave the lie to Marchmont's ideal of her by her reckless acceptance of the immediate delights he offered. The ideal would no doubt cause him to put a great deal of meaning into her acceptance; whether such meaning were one she would be prepared to indorse her mood did not allow her to consider. She showed him very marked favour that evening, and in his company contrived to forget entirely the puzzle of Quisanté and his moments, and the possible relation of those moments to the limits about which her companion was so decisive.

At last, however, they were interrupted. The interruption came from Dick Benyon, who had looked in somewhere else and arrived now at the tail of the evening. Far too eager and engrossed in his great theme to care whether his appearance were welcome, he dashed up to May, crying out even before he reached her, "Well, what do you say about him now? Wasn't he splendid?"

Clearly Dick forgot his earlier apologetic period; for him the moment was the evening. A cool question from Marchmont, the cooler perhaps for annoyance, forced Dick into explanations, and he sketched in his summary fashion the incident which had aroused his enthusiasm and made him look so confidently for a response from May. Marchmont was unreservedly and almost scornfully antagonistic.

"Oh, you're too cultivated to live," cried Dick. "Now isn't he too elegant, May?"

"I'm not the least elegant," said Marchmont, with quiet confidence. "But I'm—well, I'm what Quisanté isn't. So are you, Dick."

"Suppose we are, and by Jove, isn't he what we aren't? I'm primitive, I suppose. I think hands and brains are better than manners."

"I'll agree, but I don't like his hands or his brains either."

"He'll mount high."

"As high as Haman. I shouldn't be the least surprised to see it."

"Well, I'm not going to give him up because he doesn't shake hands at the latest fashionable angle."

"All right, Dick. And I'm not going to take him up because he's a dab at rodomontade."

"And you neither of you need fight about him," May put in, laughing. They joined in her laugh, each excusing himself by good-natured abuse of the other.

There was no question of a quarrel, but the divergence was complete, striking, and even startling. To one all was black, to the other all white; to one all tin, to the other all gold. Was there no possibility of compromise? As she sat between the two, May thought that a discriminating view of Quisanté ought to be attainable, not an oscillation from disgust to admiration, but a well-balanced stable judgment which should allow full value to merits and to defects, and sum up the man as a whole. Something of the sort she tried to suggest; neither disputant would hear of it, and Marchmont went off with an unyielding assertion that the man was a cad, no more and no less than a cad. Dick looked after him with a well-satisfied air; May fancied that opposition and the failure of others to understand intensified his satisfaction in his own discovery. But he grew mournful as he said to her,

"I shan't