and he felt her commonness with an awakening of his literary instinct,
quite as acutely, he told himself, as he should have felt it had she
been presented to him in the form of a printed page. The sense of
remoteness, of strangeness, grew upon him at each instant; he realised
the uselessness of his good intentions toward her--the utter
impossibility of snatching her or any human creature from the clutch of
temperament.

Her day was filled with engagements, she told him at the end of luncheon
when she rose to hurry off while he still lingered over his coffee; "and
I shan't be here to dine, either," she added, as an after thought. "Gus
Brady will come for me--there's the opera and a supper afterwards, so
you needn't trouble to sit up."

"But whom are you going with?" he enquired, filled for the first time
with a painful curiosity concerning the social body in which Connie
moved.

She shook her head with a gesture of irritation, while the aigrette in
her hat sent out little iridescent flashes of blue and green. "Oh, you
wouldn't know if I told you," she answered impatiently, and left the
room so hastily that he felt she had meant to wriggle away from the
repeated question. What did it mean? he wondered for a minute as he
slowly sipped his coffee. Even if she should go with Brady alone, where
was the harm of it? and why should she avoid so innocent an admission.
He was of a candidly unsuspicious nature, and since in his own mind he
had seen no particular reason for infringing upon the conventions of
society they had never given him so much as an unquiet thought.
Certainly to dine at a restaurant or attend so public a function as
grand opera with a person of the opposite sex, seemed to him a