He was filled with an immense compassion for her. Beneath her forced gayety he suspected heart-hunger. She looked a proud woman, with just that touch of distinction and mystery that makes for lurement. Her smile was a mask, rather than a means of self-expression. She would impress a stranger as being courteously on the defensive, yet anxiously ready for the excitement of attack. “A woman of experience!” one would say. “A proficient man-tamer! She fears nothing.” Her face was made up; her lips too scarlet. Teddy could see that even in the half-light. Her figure was finer than in the old days--more rounded and gracious, but still sinuous in its lines. She possessed to an even greater extent her dangerous power to fascinate. By a trick of kindness, which might mean nothing, by a hint of restrained tenderness, she could quicken the blood and set a man dreaming of goddesses in a riot of blue seas, and the throb of Pan’s pipes heard distantly in sun-smitten woodlands. Her eyes spoke of other things to Teddy. They had lost their old contentment. He recognized in them the questing melancholy that he had seen in Hal’s. She was beautiful--in some ways more beautiful: haunting and unsatisfying: an instrument for romance; a shuttered house from behind whose windows there was a continual sense of watching. Her forehead was intensely cold and white, contradicting the eagerness of the rest of her expression. Her brows were like spread wings, hovering and poised; her eyes vague as sea-clouds till they smiled, when they flashed with gleams of blue-gray sunlight. Again he wondered whether his love for Desire was an outcome of this earlier ghostly passion. They were more than ordinarily alike, even to their gestures. The hair of both was the color of ancient bronze, dark in the hollows and burnished at the edges. The mouth of each gave the key to her character, becoming any shape that an emotion made it: petulant and unreasonable; kind and gracious and adoring. But there was this great difference: Desire’s beauty had youth’s conscious certainty of conquest; in Vashti’s there was the pathetic appeal to be allowed to conquer. Her throat was still her glory, throbbing like a bird’s and slender as a flower. Rising from her low-cut gown, it showed in its full perfection. She clapped her hands, as Desire would have done, and laughed softly at the impression she had created. “Nearly old enough to be your mother; but still vain and pleased because you like me. I dressed especially for you, my littlest lover. And now--now that I’ve seen you, I’m not sorry that you’ve grown up.” She stretched out both her hands and drew him to her. “You’re nice. You’re even nicer. So tall! So brave-looking! And you’re still a dreamer, Teddy--a little god Love, peering in through the gate.” Suddenly she reached up her arms. “There! Why, you’re blushing, you dear boy. We’re going to be great friends, you and I and Desire.”