"Yours. I never considered them mine.... As though I were a girl of little consideration ... who paid herself, philosophically, for what she had lost.... Like a man's mistress after the inevitable break has come--" "Don't say that!" She shrugged her pretty shoulders: "I am a woman old enough to know what the world is, and what women do in it sometimes; and what men do.... And I am this sort of woman, Clive: I can give, I can receive, too, but only because of the happiness it bestows on the giver. And when the sympathy which must exist between giver and receiver ends, then also possession ends, for me.... Why do you look at me so seriously?" But he dared not say. And presently she went on, happily, and at random: "Of course I kept Hafiz and the first thing you ever gave me--the gun-metal wrist-watch. Here it is--" leaning across him and pulling out a drawer in her dresser. "I wear it every day when I am out. It keeps excellent time. Isn't it a darling, Clive?" He examined it in silence, nodded, and returned it to her. And she laid it away again, saying: "So you think of taking my old apartment? How odd! And how very sentimental of you, Clive." He said, forcing a light tone: "Nothing has ever been disturbed there. It's all as it was when you left. Even your gowns are hanging in the closets--" "Clive!" "We'll go around if you like. Would you care to see it again?" "Y--yes." "Then we'll go together, and you can investigate closets and bureaus and dressers--" "Clive! Why did you let those things remain?" "I didn't care to have anybody else take that place." "Do you know that what you have done is absurdly and frightfully sentimental?" "Is it?" he said, trying to laugh. "Well that snivelling and false sort of sentiment is about the best that such men as I know how to comfort themselves with--when it's too late for the real thing." "What do you mean?" "Just what I am saying. Cheap minds are fed with false sentiment; and are comforted.... I made out of that place a smug little monument to you--while you were living alone and almost penniless in a shabby rooming house on--" "Oh, Clive! You didn't know that! And anyway it would not have altered things for me." "I suppose not.... Well, Athalie; you are very wonderful to me--merciful, forgiving, nobly blind--God!" he muttered under his breath, "I don't understand how you can be so generous and gentle with me,--I don't, indeed." "If you only knew how easy it is to care for you," she said with that sweet fearlessness so characteristic of her. He bit his lips in silence. Presently she said: "I suppose there'll be gossip in the other room. Rosalie and Cecil will be cynical and they also will try to be witty at our expense. But I don't care. Do you?" "Shall we go in?" "No.... I haven't had you for four years. If you don't care what is said about us, I don't." And she looked up at him with the most engaging candour. "I'm only thinking about you, Athalie--"