I nodded. My hands had dropped naturally upon her shoulders. But I was conscious then—and indeed, am to-night, as I write it down—of some confusion of thought.     

       Then she raised her face—by stretching up on tiptoe and pulling with tight little arms about my neck. I did not know what to do. To draw my lips away from hers would be something more than absurd. There is a limit even to what I suppose I must sooner or later admit as my own unmanliness. So I kissed her, white man fashion. And, to my complete surprise, she clung to me with what seemed, for the moment, to be genuine emotion.     

       I will not attempt to explain either my nature in general or my actions at this particular time. What would be the use? I am writing this journal for my own eyes alone; and, God knows, hours enough of my life have been wasted in the pale avenues of introspection. I am not a wholly bloodless being. And I know well enough that the average man buys women now and then, here and there, whatever obligation he may think himself under to conceal the fact and thereby contribute his support to the immense foundation lie on which our Anglo-Saxon structure of virtue and morality rests.     

       I do not know why I found myself unable to stay. Perhaps in another place and at another time 't would have been different. Perhaps the beauty and charm of the house and the pleasant attractiveness of the little person herself had raised me too high above the ordinary sordid plane of this transaction, and emphasized the ugliness of it.     

       Perhaps, too, the fact (extraordinary in my lonely experience) that she had given up smiling at me, and now plainly wanted me to stay, was among the curious psychological forces that drove me away. As to why she wanted me, I can not say. I have puzzled over that part of it all the evening (it is now a quarter to midnight) without arriving at any conclusion. It may be that by unconsciously permitting her, through my deep interest in her music, to show something of her own enthusiasms and of the emotions that stirred them, I had flattered her more subtly than I knew. Who can say?     

       I turned right back to my boxes. She called a boy to carry them, and I went away. My last glimpse, as I closed her door, was of a quaint little slant-eyed person, whose hair had become disarranged and was tumbling about her ears, whose lips were parted in a 

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