CHAPTER VII

THE IRRESISTIBLE FORCE


Gerty was leaning forward among her cushions and as her visitor
approached she held out her hand, still faintly scented with cigarettes.
"Will you have coffee," she asked, "or shall I ring for tea?"

He sat down in the chair from which Trent had risen and replied with a
gesture of happy physical exhaustion. "Let me have some coffee," he
answered, "I've been out golfing all the morning, and if you don't prove
mentally stimulating I shall fall asleep before you. How many holes do
you think I played to-day?"

Gerty shrugged her shoulders over the little coffee pot. "I don't know
and it doesn't interest me," she retorted. "After six months of Europe
do you still make a god of physical exertion?"

The genial irony of his smile flashed back at her, and his eyes, half
quizzical, half searching, but wholly kind, wandered leisurely down her
slender figure. Even as he lazily sipped his coffee, with his closely
clipped, rather large brown head lying against the chair-back, she was
made to feel, not unpleasantly, the compelling animal magnetism--the
"personal quantity," as she had called it--that lay behind the masculine
bluntness of manner he affected. "Aren't you rather tumbled?" he