To return into the exaltation of the night was impossible. After all, the day was perhaps more real than the moods of dreams. She looked on the experience in a comfortable, satisfied way, always incredulous of her deeper moods, inclined to shun them with a defensive instinct that life was safer when lived on the surface.

But the night which had awakened so many dormant yearnings had brought back to her again the famine in her own soul. Lindaberry was yet confused, Massingale clear and insistent. She had arrived, at last, in her tortuous feminine logic, to the point where, in her longing, she was willing to ask herself if there were any excuse for what he had done. Once she sought to excuse him, she found small difficulty. He had been very much of a gentleman. She had led him on, tried him beyond what was right; and, even after the explosion, he had recovered himself, tried to leave in order to protect her. There had been a moment of weakness; but she had wished for that—yes, even compelled it. And then, he cared! Yes, that was the great thought that emerged from the confusion of the night: he cared! She knew it by the wound she had drawn across his eyes, by the tone of his voice when he had pleaded with her at the last. He cared, and he suffered as she suffered, fought as she fought, to remain away! But he was married—he belonged to another woman!

Marriage was to her an uncomprehended world, an impasse: a man disappeared into it as into a monastery. When she had thought of marriage, it was always as the end of life, irrevocable, and she admitted it only when some one came so strong and bewildering that nothing else mattered. She never had thought of it as an experiment, nor as something that could be rejected if found lacking. That man and woman, if unsuited, could still be yoked together before the world, living each a separate life in private, was yet outside of her analysis of human experience. There was the world of pleasure, and that world of duty—marriage.

Curiously enough, Lindaberry's story of his own deception, and the marriage of his brother—the glimpse he had given her behind the scenes of Mrs. Jock—had started new questionings. Who could blame such a husband for what he did? From which thought she proceeded to Massingale. He did not love his wife—of that she was sure. What was the arrangement, then? Perhaps he too concealed his cares, suffering in silence. Even the figures of the two men disappeared before this new obsession. She sought to create before herself the image of a wife—of his wife; for at Tenafly's she had not, in her agitation, even turned to look. Sometimes, with a feeling of guilt, she perceived a weak creature, gentle and shrinking, all tears, before whom, at the thought of inflicting pain, she retreated instinctively. At others, she saw a woman in the imagined guise of Mrs. Jock, vulture-like, scornful, icy, narrowed by worldly cravings, a pretty brute. Then she had a feeling as if she were flinging herself between the two, husband and wife, shielding the man from the woman.

"I must see her!" she said to herself passionately. She thought of Estelle Monks. She would find some way where, unknown, she would be able to look upon the face of Mrs. Massingale. And, not realizing all the wilderness that was yawning before her, she repeated: "Oh, yes! I must see her. I shan't have a moment's peace until I do!"

As if any peace were in store for her—no matter what she found!

When Lindaberry came to take her for lunch at a quiet country inn somewhere up the Hudson, she went to him without reserve, surprised at the strength of the impulses of tenderness, solicitude and protection that awoke within her. She had not yet named to herself the danger of the first overt step back to Massingale; perhaps, though, she intuitively felt the set of the tide about her, and turned to this better side of her nature. If what she might soon do lay beyond the permitted, at least this man, this saving of a soul, should be to her credit. Her religion was, indeed, of the simplest. If God would not approve of her yielding to the yearning to see Massingale again,—or what followed,—at least he would notice all the good she would pour into the life of Lindaberry. It was a sort of bargain which she secretly planned to offer: Lindaberry should buy her forgiveness! She felt glorified by this thought, finding in herself depths of gentle strength and maternal comforting which amazed her.

"Are we still dreaming, Dodo?" he said to her suddenly, when they were free of the city's clamor.

She smiled appreciatively.

"It's not a dream; it's real!" she said energetically.

"You've taken up a pretty big contract, young lady!"

"And you?"

He thought a moment.

"And I. Five years ago it would have been like a kitten toying with a ball. Now it's a question of the will—and the body! That's what we've got to find out. The body's a curious thing, Dodo, and it has curious ways of going back on you all at once, without as much as saying 'by your leave.' There was a chap in at Doctor Lampson's this morning—chap I knew in college, strong as a Hercules, a body just glowing with strength. He'll be dead within the year—galloping consumption!"

"You went to a doctor?"

"The finest. Wanted to get down to facts, Dodo; find out what's going on inside."

"What did he say?" she asked breathlessly.

"He said it could be done!" said Lindaberry in a matter-of-fact way. "We talked over ways. But first, I thought I'd give you another chance."

"What do you mean?"

"Last night, out there—stars and all that—wasn't a fair start! How do you feel now with a practical old sun winking down at you?" he asked, with a quizzical smile that did not conceal the intensity of his suspended waiting.

"Oh, Mr. Lindaberry!" she said impulsively. "Do it for your own self! Be strong!"

"No," he said quietly; "I won't do it for myself. I'll make the fight for you—to please you, Dodo! You've got hold of me as no one ever has. And then you're not afraid, bless your childish eyes! Well, am I to do it for you?"

She was quiet a moment, thrown out of all her mental calculations by the swift electric appeal to her emotional self that came with his blunt declaration. Men had loved her sooner or later, mildly or with infatuation; but she had never before felt so deeply what she and a divine hazard could mean in one life. Her eyes filled with sudden tears.

"Do it for me!" she said gently, and the next moment her heart smote her as if she had been guilty of a second lie.

"Now is a good date—rather close to Thanksgiving," he said, in his chuckling Anglo-Saxon way. Then he laid one hand on her arm and said solemnly: "Wrecks oughtn't to get sentimental. I won't! But remember this, Dodo: you're the first breath of real life that's come to me. You've got hold of me—strong! I'm going to win out for you—and I'm going—" He halted as abruptly as he had begun. "Now, that's all till I get straightened out. If I don't, forget it!"

"But you will!" she exclaimed, forgetting all her resolves to enlighten him on the subject of her affections.

"There'll be some bad bumps," he said grimly. "I've got into this night habit pretty deep—insomnia, and then anything to eat up the night. Lampson's got some new system to try out on me. Later, perhaps, I'll beat it for the woods; but just at present, a few weeks, I guess you can do me more good than anything else!"

"Can I?" she said gratefully.

"Yes. Time for lunch now. Are you starved?" he said evasively. "I'll talk over things and ways later."

As they came back, he went into detail about the fight ahead. Much that he said was technical, and she did not comprehend all. Only that his body had been fed too long on the consuming alcohol to be too suddenly deprived.

"Which means," he added, with a smile, "that you mustn't get discouraged if I break over the traces once or twice."

"Send for me!"

"Perhaps," he said doubtfully. "If I do, you need never be afraid, Dodo, no matter how much others are. I would always do what you ask!"

"I could never be afraid of you!" she answered truthfully.

The impulse that brought her closer to him was so strong that, though she said to herself that there was nothing of the sentimental in it, it seemed to her that it might be something nobler, more unselfish, more satisfying than that which she had conceived of as love between woman and man. She even went so far as to wish to herself that it might have been different, that she could have given him all without a lie, that she could have gone bravely, casting the die, into life with Lindaberry. If only she had not known Massingale! To give, to be loved, was one thing, if she had not known the blinding intoxication of being taken, of loving!

Three days later, after a half confidence to Estelle Monks, she went with her to a society bazaar where Mrs. Massingale was in charge of a booth. It was in one of the ballrooms of a new hotel, more overlaid with gilt and ornaments than the rest, specially and artfully advertised as quite the most expensive in the city. As a consequence, the rooms were packed with a struggling gazing crowd, swirling about the counters where the social patronesses looked on with the disdain of lap-dogs of high degree.

"This one—lady in baby pink, sharp face," said Estelle Monks.

In that brief terrifying instant, before she was able to raise her eyes, Dodo was shaken from head to foot. Never before had so much penetrating despair crowded upon her in such a fraction of time!

She was at a counter of fragrant hand-bags, staring up into the face of a bored, hostile, sharp-eyed woman, struggling for youth and attention—a brown little wanderer from nowhere confronting a great lady.

"What can I sell you?" said Mrs. Massingale with an instantaneous social smile.

She found herself answering, breathlessly:

"No—nothing!"

The smile faded. The lady turned indifferently. It was close, she had been on her feet almost two hours, she was pardonably annoyed at this staring girl—and she showed it.

Suddenly, her face lit up, the surface smile on duty again. A group of men advanced effusively, taking her hand delicately, like a fragile ornament. She turned, and perceiving Dodo leaning vacantly, said:

"Excuse me!"

Without too much insistence she extended her fingers and moved her from the path of possible purchasers.

Dodo went, hurt, crushed and revolting. There had been nothing which the other had not had a right to do, yet in those seconds she had experienced the deepest humiliation a woman can receive from another, the disdain of caste.

She had come penitent and full of compassion. She went in a dangerous mood; this woman, perfectly correct, perfectly emotionless, perfectly cold and brilliant, might be Mrs. Massingale; she could never be his wife!

"No, that is not a marriage!" she said indignantly to herself.

The thing she dreaded, and hoped for, had come to pass. She forgave him, and she understood!

Yet she hesitated day after day, until ten had passed in a whirl, alternately resolved, alternately recoiling. She had no defined morality. She was one of a thousand young girls of to-day, adrift, neither good nor bad, quite unmoral—the good and the bad equally responsive and the ultimate victory waiting on the first great influence from without, which would master her. She had no home; she was alone, a social mongrel. She could only hurt herself. What her parents had left her was only a heritage of lawlessness. Yet she hesitated, frightened by some fear conjured up from an unconscious self, like thin remembered notes of village bells, across the tumult of worldly clamors. At last, when she could see before her no other face, when the sound of his voice was mingled with every sound that came to her ear, when nothing else diverted her a moment from the insistent drumming ache of the present, she yielded. She went in the afternoon, just before four, to the court in Jefferson Market where she knew he was, pushing her way through the miserable, the venal, the vermin of all nations, clustered and ill smelling.

He saw her instantly as she came into the aisle.

CHAPTER XIX

For, he, too, had struggled against every instinct in him, warned by his clear and analytical brain that his hands were on the curtains of a perilous and forbidden adventure. At first he had been immensely surprised that in his forty-second year it should suddenly flash across him, from the depths of eyes of cloudy blue, that he was as human as his brother. The memory of the soft white arms against his cheek, the ecstasy of the girl who, in a twinkling, had surrendered to his domination, withholding nothing, eager and unafraid, enveloped in the blinding halo of complete renunciation and faith, her look when her eyes sought his, her lips, the sound of her voice, the naturalness of it all, the human directness, all returned again and again to demolish and scatter the careful intellectual theory of conduct which he had raised for his defense in life.

At the time when Judge Massingale, by a trick of fate, had blundered upon the acquaintance of Doré Baxter, he had arrived at that satisfactory station in life when he could look upon himself as a perfectly disciplined being. He had passed through a period of embittered emotional revolt which had threatened to carry him publicly into the divorce courts, and through a deeper period of moral revolt which came near sacrificing him on the altar of the social reformer. Now he had come to an attitude of tolerant and amused contemplation of things as they are, without fretting his spirit as to things as they should be.

His marriage had been a purely conventional one, contracted in the weak and vulnerable period of the early twenties at the instigation of his mother, who had become suddenly alarmed at a college infatuation for the daughter of one of his professors. Within a year the thoroughly unsuited couple had come to an amicable understanding of the duties involved in their covenant before the church.

Mrs. Massingale was incapable of an original mental operation, but she was clever enough to combine the opinions of those who seemed to know. She thoroughly disapproved of her husband's soiling political ventures, as beneath the dignity of a gentleman. Each week she devoted one afternoon and one evening to the encouragement of the arts; the rest was given over to the punctilious performance of the proper social duties to those whom she disliked and who disliked her. Absolutely cold and absolutely prudish, she had not hesitated, in that hazardous period of maidenhood, to effect the successful capture of such a matrimonial prize by subtle appeals to his senses; but as though bitterly resenting the means to which an unjust society reduces a modest woman to secure her future, she revenged herself on her amazed husband by a sort of vindictive antagonism.

He had fiercely combated this marriage, vowing he would marry the love of his college days, if he had to carry her off in the good old way. But his mother, being quite determined and unprincipled, paid the girl a visit, and contrived to make the interview so completely insulting that the rupture resulted immediately.

In the third year of his marriage Massingale had again become infatuated, this time with the young wife of an elderly friend. As the married relations on either side were identical, and each was chafing against the irritating and galling yoke, longing for life and liberty, the infatuation soon assumed tragic proportions. She wished to break through everything, ready to go openly with him until, their respective divorces secured, they could be married. He passed eight days feverishly inclined, debating the issue. But in the end, for the stigma that would lay across his shoulders, for the reputation of the family, the customs of a man of the world, and what not, he resisted.

He had thought then that he had sacrificed the world and the heavens for a hollow recompense; but, as the years sent the drifting sands of their oblivion over the memory, he had come to look upon this emotional adventure as a great peril avoided. He had believed then in the union of man and woman as something like a divine rage, all-absorbing, obliterating everything else—this in the bitter revolt against the deception which had come in his marriage. Ten years later he had arrived at the point of looking back with tolerant humor, and confessing to himself that for his purposes he was perhaps fortunate in a union which brought no compulsion into his life, obtruded itself in no way, and gave him complete liberty to pursue his intellectual curiosity in unrestricted intercourse with men of varied stations.

From law school he had gone as an assistant into the district attorney's office, and the three years spent in those catacombs of humanity had removed the veneer of generations of inherited snobbery. The first view of the vermin-populated halls of justice had appalled him, and aroused in him a religious fury. The spectacle of the strong riding the weak, judges gravely listening to lying hypocrisies, criminals in gold buttons and uniform, the insolence of power, the cynicism of brains, and, below all, raw humanity gasping under staggering burdens, mocked, farmed out, betrayed—all this sank so profoundly into his young enthusiasm that he swore to himself that the day would come when he would lift up his voice against iniquity, no matter how intrenched it might rest.

If at this time he had had the courage to break with social prejudices and seek reality and inspiration in the love of a woman ready to sacrifice everything for him, it is probable that he would have one day stirred the sophisticated forces of the city to furious invective, and accomplished little or great good, according to the sport of chance. But the impossibility of assuming responsibility before social conventions had its effect on the thinker, too. He gradually reconciled himself, lulled into tolerance by the good fellowship of those whom he would have to attack. He still disapproved, but he added to the first fierce protestation, "Things must be changed," the saving clause, "but I can not change them!"

Later, when, in a sudden burst of reform, a mayor, revolting against the machine, appointed him a municipal magistrate, he had progressed further, even to the point of saying that things had always been the same, here as elsewhere, that what was needed was to be practical, to accomplish quietly as much good as possible, instead of shrieking into unbelieving ears. His religious fury had subsided into a great compassion. He sought to save rather than to punish. He became known as a judge who could not be approached. He had had one or two conflicts with the machine of the shadows, and had come out victorious and respected. He was known as a very courageous man.

Life lay agreeably ahead. As the emotional and spiritual cravings departed, his curiosity increased. Life on the surface, life as a spectator, life as the confidant of others, watching developments, explosions, consequences, was very satisfying, without danger. He knew from experience the sting of great emotions, and he said to himself that that man was securest in his happiness who depended on no indispensable friendship, who cherished in his imagination no ambition linked with the stars, who took the laughter and the smiles of women, and avoided the heat, the pain and the soul-bruising of a great passion. Such love was to him yoked with tragedy, conflict, disillusionment, subjection, or crowned with final emptiness.

He had indeed become the judicial observer, watching with unsated amusement, through his thousand points of vantage, the complex panorama of human beings groping, struggling, crawling, running, bacchanalian with sudden hysteric joys, or crying against little tragedies. His intimate acquaintance with men of every calling, open or suspect, was immense. His knowledge of the city, its big and little secrets, its whys and wherefores, its entangled virtue and vice, its secret ways from respectability to shame, its strange bedfellows, the standards of honor among the corrupt and the mental sophistries of the strong, was profound. For him the baffling brownstone mask of New York did not exist. People instinctively trusted him. Criminals told him true stories in restaurants where few could venture; women of all sorts and conditions, passing before him for grave or minor offenses, often returned for advice or relief from blackmailing conditions. The police swore by him, politicians admitted his fairness. He played the game according to their standards of honor strictly on the evidence presented, never taking advantage of what was told him privately.

He was not insensible to the attraction of women. He sought their confidence, but returned none; amused at their comedies, as it amused him intellectually to reduce a lying officer to terrified confession. Twice bruised, he never attempted more than a light and agreeable comradeship. He had that curious but rather high standard of morality which one often encounters among men of his opportunity in life. He prided himself that no woman had suffered harm by him, which, translated, meant that he had never been responsible. In fact, he shrank from the thought of incurring responsibility. This was the horror that had sent him from Doré, for he was honest in his intellectual perceptions, and he saw at once that what he had blundered into was more immoral than the flesh hunter's seeking of the body, for this was trafficking with a soul.

When he had first paused to study Doré, he had perceived in her an unusual specimen of a type which he knew and enjoyed immensely. The interesting woman, to him, was the one who was destined to arouse passions and leave disaster behind her. The antagonism which had flared up between Harrigan Blood and Sassoon over her favors, the resulting quarrel as she had escaped, amused him immensely. He was not ignorant of the defensive alliance that existed between the Sassoon interests and Harrigan Blood's chain of papers, and though he judged too clearly not to doubt that a rupture was but delayed, it struck him as the very essence of human drama that forces of such magnitude could be shaken by the impertinent turn of a head or a luring smile.

"Here is a little creature who is going to make a good deal of trouble!" he thought to himself, and interested at once before the possibilities at her clever finger-tips, he had said to himself: "I am seeing the beginning of a career, and a career that will be extraordinary!"

With this keen curiosity in mind, not insensible to the fleeting compelling lure of the girl, he had gone up to her room, and suddenly, as, delighted, he had prepared to watch the net prepared for others, it had closed over him. He had had his doubts about Doré, that doubt which waits in the mind of every man before every woman; but all this left him the moment when, conquered in his arms, she had clung to him blindly, in ecstasy. He comprehended what had overwhelmed her—had overwhelmed her by surprise.

It was only when he had a dozen times sought to compose a letter which would be neither caddish, prudish, or brutal, that he perceived to what extent the old departed famine in himself had fiercely awakened. He had made up his mind instantly to master such a peril, but he had not succeeded. His conscience rose up at every turn, accusing him of cowardice. How deep had been the wound he had inflicted? Had he the right, for his own security, thus violently to separate himself from the girl who, without artifice, had suddenly revealed herself? And what would become of her? This latter idea pursued him constantly, tormenting him. Finally, oppressed by the doubts which her absence made to surge about him, he had gone to her door. She had left that very afternoon. He did not leave his name, but retreated hastily, affecting to believe that Providence had thus interfered to save him from a great calamity.

When she had flashed into his life again, that night in the noisy Jungle Room at Healey's, as he knew she must sooner or later, he was stricken with the sudden imperious claim she exerted over all his impulses. He understood all she sought to show him in the bitterness of her mood, but, beyond all the pain he saw he had inflicted, he was terrified by the thought of the danger to himself. He felt the fatality that waited in the intensity of her nature, the fatality that for a glance and a word had made enemies of Sassoon and Blood. The sight of her in the arms of other men was intolerable, and yet he could not avert his eyes. He was afraid to speak to her, but at the thought of her risking herself with Lindaberry, he had broken through all restraint. When she had gone, he had a feeling of thankfulness. He had done all he could to prevent it. After all, what did he know of her? If she could go thus with Lindaberry, what had she done with Sassoon, Harrigan Blood, others? With fifty desperate reasonings, he sought to excuse himself and find a justified way out. But always the accusation in her eyes, as she turned scornfully, disdainfully to him in all the shifting points of the dance, remained.

"She will wreck my life!" he said to himself fifty times a day, to prevent his going to her. "Why am I responsible? She knew what she was doing, that night!"

But at the first glimpse of Dodo in the blue Russian blouse, open throat and white toque turning into the aisle, he had felt a profound relief. He had done all that he humanly could do: he had resisted to the last, struggled against the impossible; and, now that she herself had resolved it, he felt immensely thankful.

The last case before him was one of daily occurrence—domestic trouble. A young mother, baby in arms, a child at her skirts, preternaturally bent and worn, had summonsed her husband into court on grounds of non-support, accusing him of intoxication. He looked at the couple, seeing deeper—the man vigorous and young, the woman whose prettiness had led him to vow eternal constancy, now lost in drudgery and unequal burden. What could he say to the unscathed young male who stood staring at him with awed glance—bid him to love what he had driven from her face and figure? The mockery of futile charges!

"Why don't you support your wife and children?" he asked, for the thousandth time. "Why don't you stop drinking?"

The husband, a young mechanic, promised volubly what each knew he would not perform.

"Put you on probation for three months!" he said sharply. "She's your wife; you married her because you wanted to. Now, stop drinking and be a man, or I'll send you up to the island. Do you understand?"

The man bowed and went out, the woman at his heels, dragging her second child, believing that a word from His Honor could change everything. Massingale watched them go, staring a moment, glanced at the clock and ended the session with a nod to his officer.

"Does it interest you?" he said to Doré, in a matter-of-fact tone.

"Yes!"

She had not seen a thing that had transpired.

They went to his private room, noisy and dark as the rest, the window-panes rattling at every elevated train that went crashing through the air. He gave his gown to an attendant, issued a few orders and they were alone. Neither spoke, waiting silently the other's advance, afraid to speak that first word; for in such moments it is the first who speaks who must explain. He continued to look at her with his magisterial stare, at bottom suddenly vindictive, resenting this girl who had dared to return into his life, to reclaim him to uncertainty and perils against his logic.

She extended her hands in a little helpless movement, shook her head and said timidly:

"Well?"

A moment before, still counseled by his reason, he had been on the point of a cold answer, resolved correctly to beg her pardon and make this interview the last. At her surrendering gesture and the plaintive note in her voice, a great pity brushed aside everything else, and he said impulsively:

"I went once—you were away. I wanted to see you!"

"I did not know," she said hurriedly, rushing at the hardest to be said,—"that night—that you were married!"

"I understood that."

The court officer returned, announcing his automobile, and they passed out. They had said nothing, and yet everything had been said.

"Where do you want to go?" he said, smiling.

"Anywhere!"

He hesitated, and then gave her address.

"We've got to have a frank talk," he said lightly; "then we can run up somewhere for dinner—to celebrate. Did you notice Riley, my special? He's a great character!"

"Funny mouth; does it ever stop grinning?" she said, joyfully, wonderfully, perfectly happy. She leaned to him, whispering in his ear: "Was he shocked at my coming?"

He was about to answer indiscreetly, but caught himself.

"Riley? No; he's quite a man of the world!"

The sunlight and the frosty December air restored his clarity of thought. He would have the plainest of conversations with her. If they could go on as free comrades, well and good. Perhaps even a certain intimacy were better; it might serve to readjust certain illusions that lingered in the memory.

He glanced at her sidewise, physically comforted at the delicacy of her profile, the light airy youth that hung about her, intangible as a perfume. He had known ten, twenty women more beautiful than Dodo, more stimulating mentally, with an elegance that she did not possess. It was impossible that this child, enticing and gay as she was, could really have stirred him to uncontrollable emotions! With these thoughts running through his mind, his confidence returned; he even began to wonder at his former fear, holding it ridiculous. If she were foolishly resolved in the conviction of a great passion, he was clever enough subtly to undeceive her, to regulate their relations and keep them within the safe limits of a confidential flirtation.

Pursuing this idea, he said nonchalantly, as they entered her room:

"Do you know, young mischief, that you have a great deal to answer for? Sassoon and Harrigan Blood are at each other's throats. Blood's been caught in the market, and is hammering the Sassoon interests like a wild one. What have you been doing with them all this time?"

"How false that all sounds!" she said abruptly.

Disconcerted, he changed his tactics, saying seriously:

"Dodo, you are a very combustible sort of person. Do you realize the danger of what we are doing?"

She shrugged her shoulders impatiently, going directly to the issue:

"Tell me about yourself—about your real self: your home, your wife! I must know!"

"I don't wish to talk about others," he said, irritated in his sense of delicacy.

"But I do!" she said passionately. "I saw her. There can be nothing between you—and her!"

He made an imperative gesture, checking himself immediately, saying with more restraint:

"There is nothing between us. Dodo, there are some things I don't think you quite understand. Whatever may exist, I can not discuss Mrs. Massingale with others!"

"'Others'!" she said indignantly, turning from him, deeply hurt.

He took her by the wrist and led her to a seat, feeling the necessity of asserting his supremacy. She allowed herself to be forced into it, looking up at him with rebellious eyes, like a naughty child.

"Do you know the danger of what you are doing?" he repeated. And then he corrected himself—"What we are doing?"

Her face changed instantly, becoming very serious. Her eyes looked past him out of the window, beginning to be blurred by the gathering tears. He drew back hastily.

"Why do you talk to me like this? What is the use of it all?"

"Why?" he exclaimed fiercely. "Because you are a child; because you try me beyond my patience; because I want to be fair and honorable with you; because I could—"

She was on her feet instantly, clapping her hands together.

"Ah, that's what I want to hear again—again!"

He halted directly, with a helpless gesture.

"Dodo," he said firmly, "listen to me! I will not make another mistake! If you don't realize things, I do. I want to be your friend; I do want to see you; but, unless it can be so, I—"

"Oh!" she cried furiously, dangerously near the point of self-dramatization. "Don't always reason; don't think of what is going to happen! Let's be as we are! I can't help it—can you? You know you can't!"

"And then?"

"Don't talk to me of then! Think of to-day! Do you think, when the first great thing has come into my life, that I'm going to put it aside for—what?" She flung her arm out toward the ugly brick side that symbolized to her all that she hated: "A little ordinary life, like every other ordinary little life? No! I told you I won't be like every one else! It's true! I don't want to live, if that's what life means!"

He said to himself swiftly that he had made a great mistake in coming; that he would end it as soon as he could; and that he would never venture again, even if he had to run away. For every accent of her voice, every flashing look, moved him perilously.

"What do you want? Do you know?" he asked roughly.

"I want to be near you; that's all I know now!" she said, folding her hands over her breast and closing her eyes.

"And the end?"

She was at his side with a bound, clutching his arm.

"Do you know what is the difference between us? I am honest; I say what I think! You are afraid to admit what you feel!"

"The situation is not the same," he said stubbornly. "The responsibility is all on my side!"

"Oh, Your Honor!" she said sublimely. "Don't let's talk! Don't you know it won't change anything? It will be such a great, great love. I know it—I feel it! So beautiful! And what else matters? It's our life, and you—you have never really lived!"

Her impetuosity sobered him. He made a turn of the room; when he came back he was smiling, with the smile she hated. "Dodo, I suppose at this moment you think you would go off with me anywhere."

"Anywhere!"

"But you wouldn't!" he said quietly. "Luckily, I understand you!" He shook his head. "Acting—always acting!"

"No!"

"Yes—acting with yourself, dramatizing a situation. But that's all! Just another precipice! Dangerous for you, but fatal to me if I were to believe you!"

"Oh, I swear to you that isn't so!" she cried, with a gesture that he appreciated, even at the moment, for its dramatic verity.

"Come!" he said quietly. "Let's be good comrades. Don't dabble with fire!"

"You think, when you leave, you will never see me again!" she said swiftly, surprising him by the penetration of her intuition. She went to him, fastening her fingers about him like the tendrils of clinging ivy. "Well, Your Honor, I will never let you go! Remember that! If you don't come, I will go and get you! You have caught me, and you can never get rid of me. I swear it!"

She sprang away quickly, affecting nonchalance. The door opened and Snyder came in, stopping short at the sight of the two figures, indistinct in the twilight.

"Come in, come in, Snyder!" Doré said hastily. "My friend, Judge Massingale."

Snyder gave him her hand abruptly, with a quick antagonistic movement, watching his embarrassed face keenly.

"Just came up to get my coat," said Doré glibly. "Going out for dinner!"

They left hurriedly, ill at ease. On the second stairway, in the dark, she stopped him, and approaching her lips so close to his ear that they almost brushed it, said:

"I am not acting; I mean everything. It is to be the great thing in my life!"

He laughed, but did not reply.

"I understand her now," he said to himself, with a feeling of strength. "She may deceive herself; she can not blind me!" Later he added uneasily: "If I ever believe her, I am lost!"

But Doré believed implicitly what she had said. At the bottom, what was working in her soul? That instinct, second only to the nesting instinct, in woman, that great protective impulse which alone explains a thousand incomprehensible attachments. He had taken her, caught her soul and her imagination, lawlessly, unfairly perhaps; but there it remained, an imperishable mark. Only one thing could atone to her self-respect—the glorification of this accident. Only when into his acquiring soul had come an immense overpowering love, could a renunciation be possible which would live in her memory, not to recall blushes of anger and shame, but to give the satisfaction of a heroic sacrifice. But the danger lay in his incredulity and resistance!

CHAPTER XX

Massingale, in fact, in the moments of her absence, was continually torn between his impulses and his logic. Logically he saw the danger without an attempt at subterfuge. He did not believe in her, and he was certain that at the last crucial test she would never break through conventionalities; but he foresaw that the true danger lay, not in her romanesque imagination, but in the hunger that would awaken in him. Even the appearance of evil must always be inscribed to his account by that judgment of society that never goes below the surface and would persist in seeing in the present situation only an inexperienced young girl and a man of the world, married, who pursued.

By every reason he sought to liberate his imagination, and only succeeded in enmeshing himself the more securely in the silk imprisonment. To each clear and warning argument a memory rose victoriously, confounding reason and bringing new longings. When in her presence, he found the study of this perplexing and ardent disciple of youth, who had darted across into his life out of nowhere, one of endless mystification and satisfaction. He forgot all his resolves in the sensation of gazing into the profoundly troubling blue of her glance, watching the divine subtleties of that smile which began in the twinkling corners of her eyes and glided, with always a note of arch malice, to the childlike lips. Sometimes he incited her to assumed anger in order to watch the sudden lights that awakened in the cloudy eyes, the sharp little teeth, brilliant against the parted red of the lips, the heightened danger-signals on the cheek. And when, in curious restaurants, removed from the prying gaze of Mrs. Grundy, they ensconced themselves, laughing with the delight of truants at finding a hiding-place, the slight pressure of her foot against his, a moment offered and a moment gone, created new philosophies in his logical brain, and he repeated to himself again and again that he would change all to be a young cub, as the young fellows who surrounded them, starting life undaunted and free. To have the right, or to do no harm!

Often, watching her sparkling mood, that showed itself in a dozen laughing tricks with cutlery or glass, mystified, he asked himself:

"Does she realize what this means?"

There lay this great difference between them—he sought gloomily to foresee the end, she was in raptures only at the beginning. In this period which preceded the inevitable one when he would find subterfuge and evasion to put his conscience to sleep, a period in which he still felt the closing of the trap on his liberty, and saw clearly because he still wished to resist, Massingale asked himself logically where each step would lead. How long could his embottled control be kept to phrases? And when, in one combustible moment, he should obey the longing to recall that hour when, conquering her, she had conquered him, what would follow?

Shrinking from the thought of another solution, he asked himself once or twice if, under her artless insouciance, there was not a deep calculation; or if, indeed, she were planning to upset everything in his life, drag him into the publicity of the divorce courts, create a new home, dissolve old habits, estrange old friends, and fasten on him new ones. He thought thus, not because he thought honestly, but because he wished to recoil from immediate responsibility.

Dodo had not the slightest care of the future. The next month or the next week did not exist; the day sufficed. She raised no questions; she contented herself rapturously with emotions.

"He will come at five—how many hours more? He will be here at five—where shall we go for dinner? Where can we be alone? He will come—"

Her mind satisfied itself with such speculations. If, at this time, he had again asked her seriously what would come of it all, she probably would have answered him pettishly, like a gay child:

"Oh, don't let's talk of annoying things."

He began a hundred comedies of resistance, some of which she detected scornfully, others which eluded, in their subtlety, her analysis. There were times when, uneasy at the growing responsibility that she was slowly drawing about his shoulders, he tried by artful questions to convince himself that she was not quite so innocent as he had believed.

"And how do you put off Sassoon all this time, and Harrigan Blood?" he asked her once, abruptly.