"I shall never write again," she answered, quietly,
without regret. It was a truth which she felt only
intuitively at the time, for her reason as yet had
hardly taken account of a fact that was perfectly
evident to the subtler perceptions of her feeling.
She would never write again--her art had been
only the exotic flowering of a luxuriant imagination
and she had lost value as a creative energy while she
had gained in experience as a human soul.

"I was too young, that was the trouble," pursued
Trent, "there were five years between us."

"My dear boy," she laughed merrily, "there was all
eternity."

His bitterness, he felt, grew heavily upon him
while he watched her. A new beauty had passed
into her face; the mystery of a thousand lives was in
her look, in her gestures, in her voice; and she ap-
peared to him not as herself alone, but as the em-
bodied essence of all former loves of which he had
dreamed--of all the enchanting dead women of whom
the poets wrote. Then he thought of Arnold Kemper,
with his exhausted emotions, his superficial clever-
ness, his engrossing middle-age, and especially of his
approaching baldness. Was love, after all, he ques-
tioned, only a re-quickened memory in particular
brain cells as modern scientists believed? Was
physical heredity, in truth, the fulfilling of the law
of life? and was the soul merely a series of vibrations
by which matter lived and moved?

All the way home his angry scepticism boiled over
in his thoughts, and at the luncheon table, a little
later, he met his mother's placid enquiries with an
explosion of boyish despair.

-312-