a remnant of freedom that must die with girlhood and its other relinquished liberties. Everything belonged to some one else now—not love alone, but interest, loyalty, confidence, duty. The rest of the world was only to get that cool interest, that gentle, remote kindness, which is the husk of the woman's heart. The kernel was for her mate. With her maidenhood would end for Letitia all life but such as bore on the life of her husband.
Gault had lost her, even as he had lost Viola. He had thought of marriage removing her from the close, interested friendliness of the old days, but he had never realized that it would wean her from him with this cold completeness. She wore the semblance of the Letitia of the past, with strange, bright, alien eyes, and a soft hand that held his with the slack, indifferent clasp of polite acquaintance. Women—would he ever understand them? Would any man? What mystery was behind their white foreheads and under their white breasts?
A rush of unutterable sadness, of dreary, sick depression, overwhelmed him. He was hardly able to respond intelligently to the conversational inanities of Pearl, who sat beside him. A numbing consciousness of the futility and hopelessness of life invaded him, and with it, in the midst of the noise and glitter of the brilliant scene, a sense of isolation and a yearning
