incalculable treasures. Alice, when she danced, held her head back with
eyes half closed; and suddenly, with her mouth a little parted, she,
too, had a look of Cytherea, a flash of the withheld beauty which
filled him with restlessness.

It startled him, and, sub-consciously, his arm tightened about her. She
responded immediately, with an accelerated breath, and the resemblance
was gone. Greatly to his relief, a man cut in on them, and once more he
found himself dancing with Anette. She asked him, in a murmurous
warmth, if he liked her, at all. And, with a new and surprising, a
distasteful, sense of lying, he replied that he did, tremendously. No,
a feeling in him, automatic and strange, responded--not Anette! He
wanted to leave her, to leave everyone here, and go. For what? At the
same time he realized that he would stay, and go out, drink, in the
Lucians' car. He had a haunting impression, familiar to him in the past
weeks, that he was betraying an essential quality of his being.

Yet along with this his other consciousness, his interest in Anette,
lingered; it existed in him tangibly, a thing of the flesh, not to be
denied. She was all prostitute, Mina Raff had said, using the word in a
general sense rather than particularly, without an obvious condemning
morality. Indeed, it might easily be converted into a term of praise,
for what, necessarily, it described was the incentive that forever
drove men out to difficult accomplishment, to anything rather than
ease. Good or bad, bad or good--which, such magic or maternity, was
which?

"What are you thinking about?"

"It would take years to tell you."