It was that summer Jerry had been driven by some such need I imagined, as I admitted in myself, to put his future in jeopardy by another marriage which on the face of it, offered even a more immediate occasion for shipwreck than the first, and I hadn't scrupled to put forth to save him, the new capacity to charm which had come upon me with the experience of not caring any more myself to be charmed. I knew; it would have been a poor tribute to my skill as an actress if I hadn't by this time known, the moves by which a man who is susceptible of being played upon at all, can be drawn into a personal interest; and though I didn't then, and do not now believe that a love serviceable for the uses of living together, can be built up out of "made" love, I was willing for the time to pit myself against the game that was played by Miss Chichester for Jerry's peace of mind. I played it all the better for not being, as the young lady was, personally involved in the stake. That I thought afterward of doing anything for myself with what I had got, when at last I had by this means brought Jerry down from Newport to my place on the Hudson for a week end, was in part due to the extraordinary charm that Jerry displayed under the stimulus of a male interest in me, of whom for years he had thought of as being quite outside such consideration. There was a kind of wistfulness about Jerry when he was a little in love, that made him irresistible; no doubt I was also a little warmed by the fire which I had blown up. He was to come from Saturday to Monday, and the moment I saw him getting down from the dog-cart I had sent to the station for him, I knew that I had only to let that interest take its course, to find myself provided with a lover, whether or no I could command my heart to loving. I do not remember that I came to any conscious decision about it, but I know that I yielded myself to the growing sense of intimacy, that I consciously drew, as one draws perfume from a flower, all that came to me from him: his new loverliness, touched still with the old solicitous sense of the preciousness of my gift. I dramatized to the full the possibility of what hung in the air between us, I dressed myself, I set the stage accordingly. It was Saturday evening after dinner that I sent him to the garden to smoke, keeping the house long enough to fix his attention on my joining him, by wondering what kept me, and so overdid my part by just so much as I made myself conscious of the taint of theatricality. For as I went down the veranda steps to meet him in the rose walk, the response of the actress in me to the perfectness of the setting and my fitness for the part of the great lady of romance, drew up out of my past a faint reminder of myself going up another pair of stairs so many years ago in the figure of an orphan child toiling through the world. Out of that memory there distilled presently a cold dew over all my purpose.