She said: "If what I say is distasteful to you, please stop me." She waited a moment; then, as he evinced no desire to check or interrupt her: "I _am_ very diffident about saying this to you--to a man so justly celebrated--pre-eminent in the greatest of all professions. I am so insignificant in comparison, so unimportant, so ignorant where you are experienced and learned. "But may I say to you that nothing dies? I am not referring to a possible spiritual world inhabited perhaps by souls. I mean that here, on this earth, all around us, nothing that has ever lived really dies.... Is what I say distasteful to you?" He offered no reply. "Because," she said in a low voice, "if I say anything more it would concern you. And what you saw.... For what you saw was alive, and real--as truly living as you and I are. It is nothing to wonder at, nothing to trouble or perplex you, to see clearly--anybody--you have ever--_loved_." He looked up at her in a silence so strained, so longing, so intense, that she felt the terrific tension. "Yes," she said, "you saw clearly and truly when you saw--her." "Who? in God's name!" "Need I tell you, Dr. Westland?" No, she had no need to tell him. His wife was dead. But it was not his wife he had seen so often in his latter years. No, she had no need to tell him. * * * * * Athalie had never been inclined to care for companions of her own sex. As a child she had played with boys, preferring them. Few women appealed to her as qualified for her friendship--only one or two here and there and at rare intervals seemed to her sufficiently interesting to cultivate. And to the girl's sensitive and shy advances, here and there, some woman responded. Thus she came to know and to exchange occasional social amenities with Adele Millis, a youthful actress, with Rosalie Faithorn, a handsome girl born to a formal social environment, but sufficiently independent to explore outside of it and snap her fingers at the opinions of those peeping over the bulwarks to see what she was doing. Also there was Peggy Brooks, a fascinating, breezy, capable young creature who was Dr. Brooks to many, and Peggy to very few. And there were one or two others, like Nina Grey and Jeanne Delauny and Anne Randolph. But of men there would have been no limit and no end had Athalie not learned very early in the game how to check them gently but firmly; how to test, pick, discriminate, sift, winnow, and choose those to be admitted to her rooms after the hours of business had ended.