slender judgment like a perpetual and imperfectly subdued convulsion of
passion.

For an instant he looked at her in attentive silence, then, as her
fingers wrestled uncertainly with the cords of her evening wrap, he rose
from his chair and bent forward to assist her.

"It's in a hard knot," she said irritably. "I can't undo it."

While he released the fastening and drew back his glance fell upon the
little bluish hollows in her temples, over which the light curls were
skilfully arranged, and as he realised fully her wasted physical
resources, it seemed to him that an allusion to anything so sordid as a
mere financial difficulty would sound not only trivial but positively
indecorous as well. With a whimsical trick of memory he recalled
abruptly a man under sentence of death in a Western gaol who had
received the night before his execution a bill for a dozen bottles of
champagne. Connie's extravagance appeared to him suddenly but a kind of
moral champagne--the particular _hasheesh_ that she had chosen from
unhappy consciousness. To live at all one must live with a dream, he
knew, and to his present flashing vision it seemed that Connie's ecstasy
of possession and his own ecstasy of desire served a like end when they
transfigured for a little while the brutal actuality from which there
was no escape except by the way of a man's own soul.

"You're ill," he said at last in a compassionate voice, "and there's
nothing for you but to get out of New York as soon as possible."

She looked disconcerted, almost incensed, by the suggestion.