Lorraine got up also.

"He's more than that. Some day you will see; unless... unles..."

"Well, unless what?"

"Oh, nothing, only a man like that can't expect to escape being spoilt.
A certain type of woman will inevitably mark him down for her prey,
and ruin all his freshness."

"Then you had better take him under your wing," Hal laughed. "It would
be a pity for such a paragon to be lost to society. Personally,
stuffed blue-and-gold Apollos don't interest me in the least. Come
along to bed. I'm dead tired," and she dragged Lorraine away.

But instead of sleeping, the acress lay silently watching a star that
shone in at her window, and thinking a little sadly about the man
nature had chosen to endow so bountifully. In a few weeks she would be
thirty-two and he was twenty-four.

Supposing it had been twenty-two instead of thirty-two, and out of his
splendour he had given his heart to her dark beauty, what a tale it
might have been - what a fairy-tale of sweet, impossible things, with a
golden-haired prince and a dark-eyed princess.

She awoke from her day-dream with a touch of impatience, apostrophising
herself for her folly. After all, what had a beautiful, successful
woman at her prime to do with a youth of twenty-four, who played
foolish games at a supper-table, and was only just beginning to know