Not that I relied on these qualities to pass him in the race for Sibella’s appreciation. My instinct in female psychology was too sure. Certainly, if such superficial qualities could have dazzled any woman, they would have dazzled Sibella, whose mind was prone to skim airily and gracefully the surface of things. Even the most transparent of women, however—if there be such things as transparent women—elude analysis when the exact qualities which attract them in their lovers come under consideration. Sibella was hardly the character one would have imagined overlooking the pinchbeck in Lionel Holland, and yet she had accepted it with a most surprising ease. Such a surrender seemed to negative all her leanings, at any rate in surface matters, to the well-bred and socially ascending scale. True, he would be rich, but Sibella had other admirers who would be richer. He had personality, and perhaps this wins with women more than anything. With all his faults he was not insignificant, and he was undeniably a very beautiful young man, notwithstanding his obvious veneer. I had taken my courage in my hands and stayed and smoked with Grahame in the library, knowing full well that Lionel and Sibella were in each other’s arms in the schoolroom. It is strange how we manage to endure the things which in anticipation were to slay us with their mere agony. Mr. and Mrs. Hallward were lax in their supervision of the engaged couple, as they had been about everything else in connection with their children. Sibella and her lover remained undisturbed when her father and mother retired for the night, and it was passably late for a young woman of respectable family to be letting her lover out when the front door closed behind him. She evidently heard our voices, for she came into the library. “You two still here?” She seated herself on the club-fender. She was wide awake, and I remembered that as a child she had never betrayed sleepiness at children’s parties—she always expressed her capacity to stay up to any hour. Her family complained that she never could be induced to rise in proper time in the morning. “Isn’t it lovely, Israel, for you to have had such a piece of luck!” “Oh, I shall always fall on my feet,” I answered, easily. “You see, I was born lucky, and that is better than being born rich.” “How do you know you were born lucky?” she asked with interest. I was not to be questioned out of my pose. “It’s like genius. An instinct teaches the genius to know himself, and something of the same thought instructs the lucky man.” I spoke with such perfect good spirits and conviction that I could see she found herself believing me. She perched herself on the edge of the great desk which occupied the centre of the library and asked for a cigarette.