passionate desire for unknown things. Of what nature they might be she did
not dream. Not love. Zora Middlemist had forsworn it. Not the worship of a
man. She had vowed by all the saints in her hierarchy that no man should
ever again enter her life. Her soul revolted against the unutterable sex.

As soon as one realizes the exquisite humbug of sublunary existence he must
weep for the pity of it.

The warm and scented air was a kiss, too, on the cheek of Septimus Dix; and
his senses, too, were enthralled by the witchery of the night. But for him
stars and scented air and the magic beauty of the sea were incarnate in the
woman by his side.

Zora, as I have said, had forgotten the poor devil's existence.




CHAPTER III


When they drove up to the Hôtel de Paris, she alighted and bade him a
smiling farewell, and went to her room with the starlight in her eyes. The
lift man asked if Madame had won. She dangled her empty purse and laughed.
Then the lift man, who had seen that light in women's eyes before, made
certain that she was in love, and opened the lift door for her with the
confidential air of the Latin who knows sweet secrets. But the lift man was
wrong. No man had a part in her soul's exultation. If Septimus Dix crossed
her mind while she was undressing, it was as a grotesque, bearing the same
relation to her emotional impression of the night as a gargoyle does to a