deception--would try to increase her attraction by representing herself
as courted, desired, fêted, run after by men. Such women always did
that. Never would she wish it to be known that she was undesired, that
she was abandoned. Men want what other men want. But who wants the
unwanted? The fact that Mrs. Chepstow allowed him to see and to realize
her solitude, so simply and so completely, proved to Nigel her almost
unwise unworldliness. The man of the world, so sceptical, was convinced.
And as to the enthusiast--he bowed down.

Nigel made the mistake of judging Mrs. Chepstow's capacity by the
measure of his own shrewdness, which in such a direction was not great.
What seemed the inevitable procedure of such a woman to Nigel's amount
of worldly cleverness, seemed the procedure to be avoided to Mrs.
Chepstow's amount of the same blessing. She seldom took the obvious
route in deception, as Isaacson had realized almost from the first
moment when he knew her. She paid people the compliment of crediting
them with astuteness, and thought it advisable to be not only more
clever than they were stupid, but more clever than they were clever.

And so Nigel's pity grew; and now, when he was "having it out" with
himself, he felt that when the season was over Mrs. Chepstow must miss
him, not because she had picked him out as a man specially attractive to
her, but simply because he had brought the human element into a very
lonely life. In their last conversation he had spoken of the end of the
season, of the exodus that would follow it.

"Oh--yes, of course," she had said, rather vaguely.

"Where are you going?"