Judith had been on the point of writing to Baird her momentous decisions, and in coming to her he had given her an unexpected opportunity. The smile did not leave her lips. "I have made all the arrangements, Nickolas--I intended to write to you about it before I left--that I am going to Paris, too--in a few days." "_You_ leave Westmore!" Baird was too much surprised to express pleasure. "Yes, I am leaving Westmore--and I doubt whether I shall ever return to it." Her color had risen; though she smiled, a little of the bitterness she felt edged her words. "I imagine it must be desolate for you here--but you, out of this setting--I can't conceive of it exactly." Then it occurred to Baird what this move of hers would mean to them both; a continued intimacy, certainly. The vague motives that had brought him to her prompted the quick addition: "We'll meet in Paris then, Judith--we'll see it together." Though undefined, there was a suggestion both in his words and his manner that affected Judith curiously, urging her to a sudden defiant candor. What had her restrained, conventional life won for her? Nothing more than expressions of gallant admiration; never the vital gripping thing. "My setting!" she said scornfully. "A woman reared as I have been has no more freedom of will than a walled-in prisoner! She's a perfect slave, bound to the past and handed over hand-tied into the future. From now on, I'm going to live. I am going to know countries, and nations, and women and men--more as a man knows them. I'm going to think as I please and live as I please. Not even the past is going to dictate my future!" She had flung out her resolve, body tense and head high. Baird studied her; she had both surprised and amused him. Though not widely experienced, he had met this sort of revolt degenerated into mere free-living. Baird considered himself broad-minded, but he had not passed beyond the conception that a woman's assertion of free thought and action invariably meant that she was considering--as he would have expressed it to himself--"going on the loose." But Judith Westmore, with her monumental pride and her immense self-respect and her narrowly conventional rearing, talking of becoming a free-lance! She didn't know what she was talking about; she could no more do it than she could fly. She would see Paris--the world and its peoples, for that matter--and "_men_," as conventionally as her class and kind always saw them. She was simply worn into exasperation by Westmore troubles--and her love for him. The thing was laughable--and a little sad.