and nasty." 

 She was silent. 

 "Now, do you understand?" 

 "I understand what you said." She looked at him as she spoke. He wondered how he could have fancied those lack-luster eyes beautiful or capable of expression. 

 "You don't believe it?" he asked. 

 "No," said she. And suddenly in those eyes, gazing now into space, there came the unutterably melancholy look—heavy-lidded from heartache, weary-wise from long, long and bitter, experiences. Yet she still looked young—girlishly young—but it was the youthful look the classic Greek sculptors tried to give their young goddesses—the youth without beginning or end—younger than a baby's, older than the oldest of the sons of men. He mocked himself for the fancies this queer creature inspired in him; but she none the less made him uneasy. 

 "You don't believe it?" he repeated. 

 "No," she answered again. "My father has taught me—some things." 

 He drummed impatiently on the table. He resented her impertinence—for, like all men of clear and positive mind, he regarded contradiction as in one aspect impudent, in another aspect evidence of the folly of his contradictor. Then he gave a short laugh—the confessing laugh of the clever man who has tried to believe his own sophistries and has failed. "Well—neither do I believe it," said he. "Now, to get the thing typewritten." 

 She seated herself at the machine and set to work. As his mind was full of the agreement he could not concentrate on anything else. From time to time he glanced at her. Then he gave up trying to work and sat furtively observing her. What a quaint little mystery it was! There was in it—that is, in her—not the least charm for him. But, in all his experience with women, he could recall no woman with a comparable development of this curious quality of multiple personalities, showing and vanishing in swift succession. 

 There had been a time when woman had interested him as a puzzle to be worked out, a maze to be explored, a temple to be penetrated—until one reached the place where the priests manipulated the machinery for the wonders and miracles to fool the devotees into 

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