CHAPTER V

WITH DEBORAH, UNDER AN OAK IN THE PARC MONCEAU

Miss Beauchamp leaned back against the piled-up sofa cushions shading her eyes with her left hand; and that hand must have been a little unsteady, since Adrian heard the bracelets upon her wrist rattle and clink.

"Shall I tell you what the something was which so moved me?" she asked. "Unless I am greatly mistaken it is the main cause of our present interview, so that to speak of it may help to make that interview easier for us both."

"Pray tell me." Adrian felt curious as to what should follow; but his curiosity was tempered by deepening respect.

"It comes to this, then, my dear young man, I think," she said. "For those who have once been acquainted with true love--I am not speaking of mere sexual passion, still less of silly flirtations or wanton amorettes--those who have once known that uniquely beautiful and illuminating condition can neither forget nor mistake it. They carry an infallible touchstone in their own eyes, and ears, and hearts. It is my privilege to carry such a touchstone; and this afternoon--there, there, don't wince; quite, quite reverently and gently I put my finger on the fact--I beheld true love again; but true love tormented and far from happy. Wasn't it so?"

"Yes," Adrian replied, with a touch of bitterness, "it was."

"And that brought certain events and experiences--your dear mother's sympathy and friendship among them--so vividly before me that I could only come home here, to this practically deserted room, and make music, as long ago, when another man, another true lover, sat where you now sit. Do you follow me?"

Adrian's heart was somewhat full. He bowed his head in silent assent.

"The ice is satisfactorily broken then? I am an old woman now. Many people, I don't doubt, describe me as a flighty, prankish old spinster, who apes departed youth in a highly ridiculous manner."

She no longer shaded her eyes with her hand, but looked full at Adrian, through the quiet light, smiling--half sibyl, half jester, but, as he felt, wholly wise, wholly kind.

"Such criticisms matter to me rather less than nothing," she continued, "since the hidden garden knows the why and wherefore of all that, and more besides. And now, my dear boy, I have said enough, I think, to show you that you can unburden yourself without reserve or hesitation. You will not speak to me of an undiscovered country."

But just then Adrian felt it difficult to speak. Coming to this woman, he had found so much more than he had asked for or expected--namely, a finding of high romance, of almost reckless generosity, which made him feel humble, feel indeed quite quaintly ignorant and inexperienced. It followed that, when he did speak, he did so in child-like fashion, protesting his innocence as though needing to disarm censure.

"Believe me, I have not acted unworthily," he said. "From the first I was charmed, I was enthralled, but I made every effort to restrain myself. Even in thought I was loyal to poor St. Leger. I did my best to conceal my admiration--I kept away, as much as I could without discourtesy. You see, her very perfection is, in a sense, her safeguard, for how inconceivably vile to endanger the peace of mind of so adorable a creature by any hint, any suggestion! It is only since St. Leger's death that I--"

"Yes, yes, I take all that for granted," Anastasia broke in. "Doesn't it stand to reason, since we are talking of true love?"

And Adrian could not forbear to smile, notwithstanding his humbled condition; the touch was so deliciously feminine in its assumption and non-logic. Unless, by chance, she was laughing at him out of her larger wisdom? Possibly she was. Well, she could do nothing but right, anyhow--so he didn't care! Whereupon he proceeded to pour forth the history of his affection in all its phases, from its first inception to the existing moment, with dramatic fervor, spreading abroad his hands descriptively, while the sentences galloped with increasing velocity and the mellow, baritone voice rose and fell.

"Ah! and can you not conceive it? After that dismal time in England, burying the dead, contending with all manner of tiresomenesses, with narrow-minded, over-strenuous, over-educated women and men--ye gods, such men!--to come back, to see her, was like coming from some underground cavern into the sunshine. She received me exquisitely. I tasted ecstasy. I was transported by hope. Then, abruptly, her manner changed; and that change did not appear to me spontaneous, but calculated--as though, in obedience to some alien influence, she unwillingly put a constraint upon herself. Since then I have reconstituted the scene repeatedly--"

"My poor dear boy!" Anastasia murmured.

"Yes, repeatedly, repeatedly. I try to convince myself that her change of manner was unwilling, not the result of caprice."

"Madame St. Leger is not capricious."

"I am sure of it. Her nature, at bottom, is serious. She reasons and obeys reason. But in this case what reason? Not dislike of me? No, no, my mind refuses such an explanation of her conduct. It would be too horrible, too desolating."

"Isn't there another rather obvious explanation of Madame St. Leger's attitude--the fear of liking you a little too much?"

"But why should she fear to like me?" poor Adrian cried. "I am no devouring monster! I have some talent, sufficient means, and no concealed vices."

And there the thought of René Dax invaded him, scorching him with positively rampant jealousy and repulsion. For could this, which he had just asserted regarding himself, be asserted with equal truth regarding the Tadpole of genius? He knew very well it could not. Still, even so, he shrank from the _rôle_ of treacherous friend or detractor.

"She can be gracious enough to others," he contented himself by saying, gazing at his hostess meanwhile, his expression altogether orphaned and pathetic.

"Dangerously gracious. And that is why I did all in my power to delay your departure this afternoon, although I knew perfectly well you were on the rack."

"But, dear God in heaven!" he broke out, incoherently, burying his face in both hands, "you cannot imply, you cannot intend to convey to me your belief--"

"That Gabrielle St. Leger contemplates marrying that libelous little horror, M. Dax? Never in life!"

Adrian got up and walked unsteadily--for indeed the floor seemed to shift and lurch beneath his feet--across the room. Without the faintest conception of what he was looking at, he minutely examined a landscape hanging upon the opposite wall. He also blew his nose and wiped his eyes. While Anastasia Beauchamp, her jaw set, leaning back against the sofa cushions, very actually and poignantly walked in that hidden garden of hers--once a Garden of Eden, and not an Adamless one--wrapped about by remembrance.

After a time the young man came back and sat down beside her. His face was white and his eyes were luminous.

"Most dear and kind friend, forgive me," he said, very gently. "I have climbed giddy pinnacles of rapture, and tumbled off them--plop--into blackest morasses of despair to-day, and my nerves have suffered."

"Ah! it has got you!" she returned. "I'm not a bit sorry for you. On the contrary, I congratulate you. For you are very handsomely and hopelessly in love."

Adrian nodded assent, pushing up the ends of his mustache with a twist of his fingers and smiling.

"Yes, yes, indeed I know," he said. "It is a thing for which to be immeasurably thankful. Yet, all the same, it has its little hours of inconvenience, as I have to-day discovered. It can hold the field to the exclusion of all else; and that with a quite demoralizing intensity, making one feel murderous toward one's oldest friends and, in respect of one's work, no better than a driveling idiot."

"Such are inevitable symptoms of the blessed state. I still congratulate you."

"But you admit, at least, that they are practically extremely impeding? And so, dear Mademoiselle, you whom my mother loved and who loved my mother, you who have done so much to help and comfort me in the last half-hour--will you do something more?"

"I suppose I shall," Anastasia answered, with a laugh which was against herself rather than against him. "I seem to be pretty thoroughly committed to this business for--well, for two people's sakes, perhaps."

"Yes, for her sake also--for hers as well as mine," Adrian cried, impetuously. "Those few words are beautifully full of encouragement. For see here," he went on, "in some ways I am just simply an obstinate, pig-headed Englishman. You permit me to speak quite freely? Loosing her, I cannot console myself elsewhere. It is not merely a wife that I want; having reached the age when a man should range himself a well-bred, healthy, and generally unexceptionable mother for his children! Don't imagine that I would not like to make my subscription to humanity in the form of charming babies. Of course I should. Still those small people, however beguiling, are not to the point in this connection. I am not in pursuit of a suitable marriage, but of--"

"_La belle Gabrielle_--only and solely _la belle Gabrielle_--that must be conspicuously evident to the meanest intelligence," Anastasia put in, merrily. "But there, unfortunately, we run up against the crux of the whole situation. For, it is only fair to tell you, our exquisite young woman is even less in pursuit of a suitable marriage than you yourself are. We have had some intimate conversations, she and I. Don't imagine for an instant your name, or any other name, has been hinted at, much less mentioned. But she has been good enough to bestow her confidence upon me, in as far as she bestows it upon any one. Fundamentally she is a mysterious creature, and that's exactly why, I suppose, one finds her so endlessly interesting. And, from those conversations, I gather her mind is set on things quite other than marriage."

"Ah! just Heaven--and what things, then?" poor Adrian exclaimed, distraction again threatening him.

"She would, I think, have very great difficulty in telling you."

Here distraction did more than threaten. It jumped on him, so that in his agitation he positively bounced, ball-like, upon the seat of the sofa.

"I knew it," he cried. "I was sure of it. Almost immediately I detected an alien and inimical influence intrude itself between us, as I have already told you, and battle against me. And this was the more detestable to me because I felt powerless to combat it, being ignorant whence it came and what its nature actually was."

Miss Beauchamp looked at him indulgently. And he, distraction notwithstanding, perceived that her countenance once more had grown sibylline. This served sensibly to quiet and steady him.

"I fancy that influence comes from very deep and very far," she said. "A woman of so much temperament and so much intelligence as Gabrielle St. Leger must, of necessity, be the child of the age in which she lives, in touch with the spirit of it. Her eyes are turned toward the future, and the strange unrestful wind, the wind of Modernity, which blows from out the future, is upon her face. This is the influence you have to battle against, my dear young man, I am afraid, nothing less than the Spirit of the Age, the spirit of Modernity. You have your work cut out for you! To combat it successfully will be--to put it vulgarly--a mighty tough job."

"Like King David of old, I'd rather fall into the hands of God than into those of man," Adrian returned, with rather rueful humor.

"Is one so very sure they are the hands of the Almighty? Too often one has reason to suspect they belong to exactly the opposite person--the inspirer--namely, of so many of your friend M. René Dax's unpardonable caricatures. But there," she added, "I don't want to give place to prejudice; though whether Modernity is veritably the highroad to the state of human earthly felicity its exponents so confidently--and truculently--predict, or not rather to some appalling and final catastrophe, some Armageddon, and Twilight of the Gods, appears to me, in the existing stage of its evolution, open to the liveliest question. Fortunately, at my time of life one is free to stand aside and look on, passively awaiting the event without taking part in the production of it. But with Madame St. Leger, as with yourself, it is different. You are on the active list. Whether you like or not, you are bound to

## participate in the production of the event--and she, at least, is by no

means unwilling to do so."

"But how, _chère Mademoiselle_, but how?" Adrian questioned.

"After a fashion you can hardly be expected to indorse enthusiastically."

Miss Beauchamp shaded her eyes with her left hand again, while the many bracelets slipping up her thin wrist clinked and rattled.

"See here, my dear Savage," she said, "among all the destructions and reconstructions, the changes--many of them nominal rather than real, and, consequently, superfluous--of which Modernity is made up, one change is very real and has, I sincerely believe, come to stay. I mean the widespread change in thought and attitude of my sex toward yours."

"Feminism, in short."

"In short, Feminism."

A little silence followed. Then: "You take the dose very nicely," Anastasia said.

"Perhaps I take it so nicely because I am convinced it is innocuous. On the other hand, perhaps I don't take it at all. Really, I am not certain which."

He shifted his position, planting his elbows on his knees and his chin in the hollow of his hands.

"The deuce, the deuce!" he said, softly, tapping one long-toed boot meditatively upon the floor.

Miss Beauchamp watched him, amused, observant, making no comment.

"I am sorry," he went on, presently. "It's all moonshine, of course. Nature's too strong for them. In the end they must come into line."

"Moonshine has often proved a very dangerous, because so very intangible an enemy. And the end promises to be far off."

"Yes, I am sorry," Adrian repeated, "very sorry, we were over in England I could understand. Women there have an excuse for revolt. All Englishmen are pedants, even in their games, even in their sport. They have been called a nation of shopkeepers. They might with equal truth be called a nation of schoolmasters; not because they desire to impart knowledge, but because they crave to exercise power and prove, to themselves, their innate superiority by the chastisement of others. Ah! I have witnessed plenty of that in the last month! Truly, they are very disagreeable sons, husbands, and fathers, those middle-class Britons, the schoolmaster, so to speak, permanently on top. And there are not even enough of them to go round! Numerically they are inferior; and this helps to feed their arrogance and inflame their conceit. But even if there were enough, they wouldn't--if I may so express myself--go round. On the contrary, they would go in the opposite direction, to their own selfish pleasures, their clubs, their playing-fields, their interminable football, and cricket, and golf."

"Hum--hum! What about the British flag you waved so vigorously five minutes ago?"

"Did I? Forget it, then. It was a passing aberration. I repent and wrap myself once more in the folds of the tricolor. Most distinctly that is the flag under which a lover of your adorable sex should fight!"

"With the Gallic cock set symbolic at the top of the flag-staff?"

"And why not? Why not? Who can do otherwise than behold with approval that smart, well-groomed, abundantly amatory, I grant you, but also abundantly chivalrous fowl? His absence is, in a sense, precisely that with which I quarrel on the other side of the Channel. It goes to make the revolt of the Englishwoman comprehensible. Her countrymen's relation to her is so inartistic, so utilitarian, so without delicate humor. We hear of her freedom from annoyance, her personal security. But in what do these take their rise? Simply in her countrymen's indifference to her--to her emotions, her mentality, her thousand and one delicate needs, elusive and charming necessities. If he thinks about her at all, it is with the schoolmaster's odious design of correcting her faults, of improving her. The blatant conceit of the animal! As if she could be improved, as if she were not perfect already! But stay. There I pause to correct myself. The Englishwoman is susceptible of improvement. And how? By being snubbed, depressed, depreciated, grumbled at, scolded, made to think meanly of herself? Never a bit.--She has suffered generations of that treatment already. By being admired, reverenced, playfully delighted in, appreciated, encouraged."

Adrian spread abroad his hands with the most amiably persuasive expression and gesture.

"Ah! believe me, dear friend," he cried, "when Luther, the burly renegade German monk; Calvin, the parchment-dry, middle-class Picard lawyer, and English 'King Hal,' of grossest memory, conspired to depose Our Blessed Lady from her rightful throne in heaven, they, incidentally, went far to depose woman from her rightful throne here upon earth. So that, small wonder, having no eternal, universal Mother, whose aid and patronage she can invoke in hours of perplexity and distress, the modern, non-Catholic woman is constrained to rush around in prison-vans, or any other unlovely public vehicle which may come handy, invoking the aid of parliamentary suffrage and kindred dreary mechanical forms of protection against the tedious tyrannies of arrogant, sullen, selfish, slow-witted, birch-rod-wielding, pedagogic man. Yes, truly, as over there, I understand, I sympathize. But here, where, though we may have tolerated, even invented, Revolution, we have at least withstood that most time-serving and inartistic compromise, Reformation--with an impudent capital letter--here, in the patrimony of Chantecler, enveloped in the folds of the gallant tricolor, surely such revolt is unreasonable, is out of place! For here are we not all Feminists, every man-jack of us? _Chère Mademoiselle_, you know that we are. What more, then, have the members of your adored sex to ask?"

And, for the moment, Anastasia Beauchamp's usually ready tongue played her false. The whirl of words had been somewhat overpowering, while, through the whirl, his good faith was so transparently apparent, his argument suggested rather than aggressively pressed home, so evidently to himself conclusive, that a cogent answer was far from easy to frame.

"What more have they to ask?" she said, presently, smiling at him. "Well, just those alluring, because new, untried and intangible satisfactions which the Spirit of the Age promises so largely, and which you, my dear Savage, if you'll pardon my saying, don't and can't promise at all."

"The Spirit of the Age now, as so often in history, will prove a false prophet, a charlatan and juggler, making large promises which he will fail to redeem," Adrian declared. "See, do not art, nature, the cumulative result of human experience, combine to discredit his methods and condemn his objects?"

"Convince Gabrielle St. Leger of that, and my thanks and applause will not be wanting."

"I will convince her," Adrian cried, with growing exaltation. "I will convince her. I devote my life to that purpose, to that end."

And thereupon a certain solemnity seemed to descend upon and diffuse itself through the quiet, lofty room, affecting both speaker and listener, causing them to sit silent, as though in hushed suspense, awaiting the sensible ratification of some serious engagement entered into, some binding oath taken. In the stillness faint, fugitive echoes reached them of the palpitating life and movement of the city outside. The effect was arresting. To Adrian it seemed as though he stood on the extreme edge, the crumbling, treacherous verge, of some momentous episode in which he was foredoomed to play a part, but a part alien to his desires and defiant of his control. While--and this touched him with intimate, though half-ashamed, shrinking and repudiation--not Gabrielle St. Leger, but Joanna Smyrthwaite appeared to stand beside him imploring rescue and safety upon that treacherously crumbling verge. His sense of her presence was so acute, so overmastering in its intensity, that he felt in an instant more he should hear her flat, colorless voice and be compelled--how unwillingly!--to meet the fixed scrutiny of her pale, insatiable eyes.

Then, startling in its suddenness as the ping of a rifle-bullet, came a very different sound to that of Joanna's toneless voice close at hand. For, with a wrenching twang and thin, piercing, long-drawn vibration which shuddered through the air, shuddered through every object in the room, strangely setting in motion that pervasive scent of cedar and sandalwood, a string of the piano broke.

Miss Beauchamp uttered an angry, yet smothered, cry, as one who receives and resents an unexpected hurt. And Adrian, alarmed, agitated, hardly understanding what had actually occurred, turning to her, perceived that her countenance again had changed. Now it was that neither of sibyl nor of jester, but vivid, keen with fight. Yet, even as he looked, it grew gray, grief-smitten, immeasurably, frighteningly old.

Natural pity, and some inherited instinct of healing, made the young man lean toward her and take her hand in his, holding and chafing it, while his finger-tips sought and found the little space between the sinews of the wrist where the tides of life ebb and flow. Her pulse was barely perceptible, intermittent, weak as a thread.

Adrian took the other passive hand, and, chafing both, used this contact as a conduit along which to transmit some of his own fine vitality. His act of willing this transmission was conscious, determined, his concentration of purpose great; so that presently, while he watched her, the grayness lifted, her lips regained their normal color, her pulse steadied and strengthened, and her face filled out, resuming its natural contours. Then as she moved sat upright, smiling, an unusual softness in her expression.

"Don't attempt to speak yet," he said, still busy with and somewhat excited by his work of restoration. "Rest a little. I have been a shameless egoist this evening. I have talked too much, have made too heavy a demand upon your sympathies, and so have exhausted you."

"Whatever you may have taken, you have more than paid back," she answered. She was touched--a nostalgia being upon her for things no longer possible, for youth and all the glory and sweetness of youth. "It is not for nothing that you are the son of a famous physician and of a woman of remarkable imaginative gifts," she went on. "You have _la main heureuse_, life-giving both to body and spirit. This is a power and a great one. But now that, thanks to you, my weakness is passed we will not remain in this room. You said it was full of splendid echoes, good for the soul. It is rather too full of them, since one's soul is still weighted with a body. I find them oppressive in their suggestion and demand. Frankly, I dare not expose myself to their influence any longer."

Helped by Adrian, she rose and, taking his arm, moved slowly toward the doorway.

"Sometimes, unexpectedly, the merciful dimness which holds our eyes is broken up, giving place to momentary clear-seeing of all which lies beyond and around the commonplace and conventional medium in which we live. Unless one is rather abnormally constituted that clear-seeing is liable to blind rather than to illuminate. Flesh and blood aren't quite equal to it. And so with the snapping of the piano string. Doubtless the causes were simple enough--some peculiar atmospheric conditions, along with the fact that the instrument has been unused for many months. Still in me it produced one of those fateful instants of clairvoyance. I knew it for the signing of a death-warrant. Not my own. Thanks to the kindly ministrations of _la main heureuse_ the signature of that particular warrant is postponed for a while yet. Nor yours either, of that I am convinced. I cannot say whose. The clear-seeing was too rapidly obscured by failing bodily strength. I am not talking nonsense. This has happened twice before. The second time a string broke my brother's death followed within the year."

"And the first time?" Adrian felt impelled to ask. His recent expenditure of will-power had left his nerves in a state of slightly unstable equilibrium which rendered him highly impressionable.

"The first time?" Miss Beauchamp repeated, lifting her hand from his arm. "The death of that other true lover, who listened here to my playing, of the friend who walked with me in the hidden garden, followed the breaking of the first string."

Adrian stepped forward and held aside the embroidered curtain, letting her pass into the drawing-room. Here the air was lighter, the moral and emotional atmosphere, as it seemed to him, lighter likewise. He was aware of a relaxation of mental tension and a deadening of sensation which he at once welcomed and regretted. He waited a few seconds until he was sure that in his own case, too, any disquieting tendency to clairvoyance was over and the conventional and commonplace had fairly come back.

Miss Beauchamp passed on into the first room of the suite. Here the lights were turned on and he found her seated at a little supper-table, vivacious, accentuated in aspect and manner, flaming pagoda of curls and frisky cinnamon-colored, sequin-sewn tea-gown once again very much in evidence. But these things no longer jarred on him. He could view them in their true perspective, as the masquerade make-up with which a proud woman elected--in self-defense--to disguise too deep a knowledge, too sensitive a nature, and too passionate a heart.

"Yes, sit down, my dear Savage," she cried, "sit down. Eat and drink. For really it is about time we both indulged in what are vulgarly called 'light refreshments.' We have been surprisingly clever, you and I, and have rubbed our wits together to the emission of many sparks! I am not a bit above restoring wasted tissue in this practical manner--nor, I trust, are you. Moreover, our lengthy discourse notwithstanding, I have still five words to say to you. For, see, very soon Madame St. Leger's period of mourning will be over. She will begin to go into society again."

"Alas! yes." Adrian sighed.

"You don't like it? Probably not. You would prefer keeping her, like blessed St. Barbara, shut up on the top of her tower, I dare say. But doesn't it occur to you that there are as insidious dangers on the tower top as in the world below--visits from the little horror, M. René Dax, for example? Anyhow, she will shortly very certainly descend from the tower. For we are neither of us, I suppose, under the delusion she has buried all her joy of living in poor Horace St. Leger's grave."

"I have no violent objection to her not having done so," Adrian said, with becoming gravity.

"That first descent after her long seclusion will be critical. She will need protection and advice."

"Her mother, Madame Vernois, is at hand," Adrian remarked, perhaps rather tentatively.

"Yes, a sweet person and a devoted mother; but a little conspicuously with the outlook and moral standards of a past generation. She is at once too charitable and too humble-minded to be a judge of character--one born to follow rather than to lead--and, though a woman of breeding and position, always a provincial. She followed Professor Vernois as long as he was here to follow. Then she followed her noble and needy relations away in Chambéry. Now she follows her beautiful daughter. And the daughter, in the near future, is going to be a mark for the archers--male and female. Already I have reason to believe that archery practice has begun. The sweet, timid mother, though perplexed and anxious, hasn't a notion how to turn those arrows aside."

Miss Beauchamp gazed into the shallow depths of her wine-glass.

"It's an unsavory subject," she continued, "and, I agree with you, Feminism has next to no legitimate excuse for existence here. That is just why, I imagine, it has allied itself with ideas and practices not precisely legitimate. It makes its appeal to by no means the most exalted elements of our very mixed human nature."

"Ah! but," Adrian broke out in a white heat of anger, "it is not possible! Such persons would never presume--"

"They have already presumed. Zélie de Gand, helped by I don't quite know who, though I have my suspicions, has approached Madame St. Leger. She is crazy to recover lost ground, to get herself and her clique reinstated. Madame St. Leger's beauty, brains, and her reputation--so absolutely unsullied and above suspicion--represent an immense asset to any cause she may embrace."

"But need she embrace any cause?"

"My dear young man," Miss Beauchamp returned, smiling rather broadly, "you had better take it for said, once and for all, that a beautiful young woman of seven and twenty, who is beginning the world afresh after being relieved of a not entirely satisfactory marriage, is perfectly certain to embrace--well--well--Something, if she doesn't embrace Somebody."

Presently, after a silence, Anastasia spoke again, gently and seriously.

"I am altogether on your side," she said. "But I cannot pretend it is plain sailing for you. There is a reserve of enthusiasm in her nature, an heroic strain pushing her toward great enterprises. It may be she will suffer before she arrives, will be led astray, will follow delusions. Her mind is critical rather than creative. She is disposed to distrust her instincts and to reason where she had ten thousand times better only feel. And, as I tell you, she looks toward the future; the restless wind of it is upon her face, alluring, exciting her. No--no--it is not plain sailing for you, my dear young man. But, for Heaven's sake, don't let true love be your undoing, seducing you from work, from personal achievement in your own admirable world of letters. For remember, the greater your own success the more you have to offer. And the modern woman asks that. She requires not merely Somebody to whom to give herself, but Something which shall so satisfy her brain and her ambitions as to make that supreme act of giving worth while."

Anastasia smiled wistfully, sadly.

"Yes, indeed, times have changed and the fashion of them! Man's supremacy is very quaintly threatened. For the first time in the history of the human race he finds sex at a discount.--But now good-night, my dear Savage. Whenever you think I can help you, come. You will always be welcome. And--this last word at parting--do your possible to keep that little horror away from her. In him Modernity finds a most malign embodiment. Farewell."

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