next day, after a dazed reading of the morning newspapers, he summed
up his knowledge of her, was all he could recall--the garnered drift-
wood of a talk that had extended over twelve hours.

"You look," he said once, glancing critically at her, "as if you had
lived for centuries and had learned all the lessons life could teach."

She shook her head. "I have lived for centuries, so far as that goes,"
she said, "but of all the lessons I've really learned only one."

"And that is?"

"How little it all amounts to."

Again, as he studied her, he experienced an unpleasant little tremor.
He felt at the same time an odd conviction that this woman had played
a part all day, and that now, through fatigue and depression, she was
tiring of her role and would cast it away, showing herself to him as
she was. For some reason he did not want this. The face behind the
mask, of which he was beginning to get a glimpse at intervals, was a
face he feared he would not like. He shrank from it as a child shrinks
from what it does not understand.

Much to his relief, she threw off the dark mood that seemed to
threaten her, and at the play she was more human than she had been
yet.

"Ah, that first act," she said, as the curtain fell on Peter Pan's
flight through the window with the Darling Children--"that delicious
first act! Of course Barrie can't keep it up--no one could. But the