could justify her reputation. On the whole he was glad of it. Any other form of attraction was more welcome to him than a purely physical one!

“First of all,” she began, leaning forward and looking at him over her interlaced fingers; “I want you to tell me this! You will answer me faithfully, I know. What did you think of my writing to you, of my persistence? Tell me exactly what you thought.”

“I was surprised,” he answered; “how could I help it? I was surprised, too,” he added, “to find that I wanted very much to come.”

“The women whom you know,” she said quietly,—“I suppose you do know some,—would not have done such a thing. Some people say that I am mad! One may as well try to live up to one’s reputation; I have taken a little of the license of madness.”

“It was unusual, perhaps,” he admitted; “but who is not weary of usual things? I gathered from your note that you had something to explain. I was anxious to hear what that explanation could be.”

She was silent for a moment, her eyes fixed upon vacancy, a faint smile at the corners of her lips.

“First,” she said, “let me tell you this. I want to have you understand why I was anxious that you should not think worse of me than I deserved. I am rather a spoilt woman. I have grown used to having my own way; I wanted to know you, I have wanted to for some time. We have passed one another day after day; I knew quite well all the time who you were, and it seemed so stupid! Do you know once or twice I have had an insane desire to come right up to your chair and break in upon your meditations,—hold out my hand and make you talk to me? That would have been worse than this, would it not? But I firmly believe that I should have done it some day. So you see I wrote my little note in self-defence.”

“I do not know that I should have been so completely surprised after all,” he said. “I, too, have felt something of what you have expressed. I have been interested in your comings and your goings. But then you knew that, or you would never have written to me.”

“One sacrifices so much,” she murmured, “on the altars of the modern Goddess. We live in such a tiny compass,—nothing ever happens. It is only psychologically that one’s emotions can be reached at all. Events are quite out of date. I am speaking from a woman’s point of view.”

“You should have lived,” he said, smiling, “in the days of Joan of Arc.”

“No doubt,” she answered, “I should have found that equally dull. What I was endeavouring to do was, first of all to plead some justification for wanting to know you. For a woman there is nothing left but the study of personalities.”

“Mine,” he answered with a faint gleam in his eyes, “is very much at your service.”

“I am going to take you at your word,” she warned him.

“You will be very much disappointed. I am perfectly willing to be dissected, but the result will be inadequate.”

She leaned back amongst the cushions and looked at him thoughtfully.

“Listen,” she said; “I can tell you something of your history, as you will see. I want you to fill in the blanks.”

“Mine,” he murmured, “will be the greater task. My life is a record of blank places. The history is to come.”

“This,” she said, “is the extent of my knowledge. You were the second son of Sir Lionel Matravers, and you have been an orphan since you were very young. You were meant to take Holy Orders, but when the time came you declined. At Oxford you did very well indeed. You established a brilliant reputation as a classical scholar, and you became a fellow of St. John’s.

“It was whilst you were there that you wrote Studies in Character. Two years ago, I do not know why, you gave up your fellowship and came to London. You took up the editorship of a Review—the Bi-Weekly, I think—but you resigned it on a matter of principle. You have a somewhat curious reputation. The Scrutineer invariably alludes to you as the Apostle of Æstheticism. You are reported to have fixed views as to the conduct of life, down even to its most trifling details. That sounds unpleasant, but it probably isn’t altogether true.... Don’t interrupt, please! You have no intimate friends, but you go sometimes into society. You are apparently a mixture of poet, philosopher, and man of fashion. I have heard you spoken of more than once as a disciple of Epicurus. You also, in the course of your literary work, review novels—unfortunately for me—and six months ago you were the cause of my nearly crying my eyes out. It was perhaps silly of me to attempt, without any literary experience, to write a modern story, but my own life supplied the motive, and at least I was faithful to what I felt and knew. No one else has ever said such cruel things about my work.

“Woman-like, you see, I repay my injuries by becoming interested in you. If you had praised my book, I daresay I should never have thought of you at all. Then there is one thing more. Every day you sit in the Park close to where I stop, and—you look at me. It seems as though we had often spoken there. Shall I tell you what I have been vain enough to think sometimes?

“I have watched you from a distance, often before you have seen me. You always sit in the same attitude, your eyebrows are a little contracted, there is generally the ghost of a smile upon your lips. You are like an outsider who has come to look upon a brilliant show. I could fancy that you have clothed yourself in the personality of that young Roman noble whose name you have made so famous, and from another age were gazing tolerantly and even kindly upon the folly and the pageantry which have survived for two thousand years. And then I have taken my little place in the procession, and I have fancied that a subtle change has stolen into your face. You have looked at me as gravely as ever, but no longer as an impersonal spectator.

“It is as though I have seemed a live person to you, and the others, mummies. Once the change came so swiftly that I smiled at you,—I could not help it,—and you looked away.”

“I remember it distinctly,” he interrupted. “I thought the smile was for some one behind me.”

She shook her head.

“It was for you. Now I have finished. Fill in the blanks, please.”

He was content to answer her in the same strain. The effect of her complete naturalness was already upon him.

“So far as my personal history is concerned,” he told her, “you are wonderfully correct. There is nothing more to be said about it. I gave up my fellowship at Oxford because I have always been convinced of the increasing narrowness and limitations of purely academic culture and scholarship. I was afraid of what I should become as an old man, of what I was already growing into. I wanted to have a closer grip upon human things, to be in more sympathetic relations with the great world of my fellow-men. Can you understand me, I wonder? The influences of a university town are too purely scholarly to produce literary work of wide human interest. London had always fascinated me—though as yet I have met with many disappointments. As to the Bi-Weekly, it was my first idea to undertake no fixed literary work, and it was only after great pressure that I took it for a time. As you know, my editorship was a failure.”

He paused for a moment or two, and looked