"Mayn't I at least see you down?" he asked. "How do you go?"

"There's really no need to trouble you," she answered, "I shall go a
part of the way in the stage."

She went out, and as he followed her down the staircase he asked himself
again the puzzling question: "She is different from other women--but how
is she different?" And still he assured himself with confidence that
what he liked in her was her serene separateness from the appeal of
passion. "This is the thing that lasts--that really lasts for a
lifetime," he said in his thoughts.




CHAPTER VIII

PROVES THAT A POOR LOVER MAY MAKE AN EXCELLENT FRIEND


That night in her sitting-room, while she corrected the proof-sheets of
her new book of verse, Laura remembered Kemper's face as he sat across
from her on the long seat of the almost empty stage. Beyond him was the
humming city, where the lights bloomed like white flowers out of the
enveloping dusk, and when he turned his profile, as he did once, against
a jeweller's window, she saw every line of his large, strongly marked
features silhouetted with distinctness on a brilliant background. Twice
during the ride down she had been conscious, as when they left Gerty's
house together, that he was more masculine than any man she had known
closely in her life, and at first she had told herself that his nervous