Cytherea, at this moment, would be softly illuminated by the shifting glow of the fire and, remote in her magical perspective, would seem at the point of moving, of beckoning for him with her lifted hand. “What were you seeing in the smoke?” Savina asked; and he replied with an adequate truth, “You.” “Why not just look at me, then, instead of staring?” “I see you everywhere.” “Adorable,” she whispered. No such name, no terms of endearment, occurred to him for her; why, he didn't know; but they had no place in his present situation. He had to think of Savina as removed from whatever had described and touched other special women. The words which had always been the indispensable property of such affairs were now distasteful to him. They seemed to have a smoothly false, a brassy, ring; while he was fully, even gaily, committed, he had a necessity to make his relationship with Savina Grove wholly honest. As he paid the account she asked him if he were rich. “Your husband wouldn't think so,” he replied; “yet I am doing well enough; I can afford dinner and the theatre.” “I wish you had a very great deal of money.” “Why?” He gazed at her curiously. “It's so useful,” Savina told him generally; but that, he felt, was not completely what was in her mind. “What I have,” she went on, “is quite separate from William's. It is my mother's estate.” “My brother, Daniel, has done very well in Cuba,” Lee commented. Savina was interested: “I have never been there; cooler climates are supposed to suit my heart better; but I know I should love it--the close burning days and intense nights.” “Daniel tells me there's usually the trade wind at night.” His voice reflected his lack of concern. “I have a feeling,” she persisted, “that I am more of Havana than I am, for example, of Islesboro. Something in the tropics and the people, the Spanish! Those dancing girls in gorgeous shawls, they haven't any clothes underneath; and that nakedness, the violence of their passions, the danger and the knives and the windows with iron bars, stir me. It's all so different from New York. I want to burn up with a red flower in my hair and not cool into stagnation.” They were in her closed automobile, where it was faintly scented by roses yellow and not crimson. She sat upright, withdrawn from him, with her hands clenched in her lap. How she opposed every quality of Mina Raff's; what a contradiction the two women, equally vital, presented. And Fanny, perhaps no less forceful, was still another individual. Lee Randon was appalled at the power lying in the fragile persons of women. It controlled the changeless and fateful elements of life; while the strength of men, it occurred to him further, was concerned with such secondary affairs as individual ambitions and a struggle eternally condemned to failure. Savina relaxed, every instinct and nerve turned toward him, but they were at the theatre.