was nothing that he would deny her . . . nothing that he was able to give; and what she wanted from him, he would never be able to give because he was, after all, only a poor thing.
But the hardest part of the ordeal lay before her. It was the meeting with Callendar when, for the first time, they would both be forced to recognize the truth and deny it, forever. She understood this well enough; she was in a way even eager to have it occur at once so that she might put the memory of it behind her, so that she might stamp out the incident forever and go on her triumphant way. It came at last when Callendar, in a brief note, asked if he might call upon her. The letter, in a headlong handwriting so unlike the mocking cynicism which he cultivated, gave no hint of what was in his mind. It asked merely that she set a time and place.
She bade him come to the apartment in the Babylon Arms and he came, strangely sobered and quiet, with a chastened look in his gray eyes. At sight of him he appeared to her, as it seemed long afterward, for the first time in any semblance of reality; he existed with a new clarity, a new distinctness of outline. It was as if she had never seen him rightly before, as if until now he had been to her some one whom she accepted vaguely without questioning. Only one quality carried over completely into the new Callendar; it was the old sense of conflict, of will against will, of a pleasurable, almost perverse sensation of struggle. The new Callendar was an older man in a fashion she could not altogether define, save that the impression was related to the effect which his mother had upon her, of weakening and diminishing all reliance in herself.
The first thing she said to him was, "I am frightened."
He took off his hat and laid it quietly on the divan by the side of his stick and then he turned and looking at her with his strange gray eyes, replied, "I too am frightened."
Among the cheap furniture that crowded the room the old sense of his superiority returned to her, mingled this time with a new
