And the poets are often right, where sane folk are wrong. The golden Helen--typifying the blind, all-engulfing love that laughs alike at reason and at destruction--lives and shall live while men are men. She lived as Cleopatra, for whom Antony deemed the world well lost. She lives as the hideously coiffured shopgirl with the debutante slouch and the blue-white powdered nose, for whom a ten-dollar-a-week clerk robs the till and goes to jail. And, as in the earliest days of her mortal wanderings, men ever stretch forth their arms to her as she passes, and beseech her to stay her flight long enough to let them damn themselves for her. And, as in those early days, women ever band together in righteous wrath to drive her forth into the darkness. Poor Helen! Or--is it happy Helen? I think the former adjective is to be chosen. For the game she plays can end only in ultimate loss to herself. And that game's true winners, in the long run, are the very women who, fearing her spell over their loved ones, harry her forth to new wanderings. This thought should comfort them in the inevitable hour when golden Helen's shadow shall fall momentarily athwart their placid lives. The prim path must inevitably triumph over the primrose path. CHAPTER FIVE MADAME JUMEL NEW YORK'S FIRST OFFICIAL HEART BREAKER Far to the north, on New York City's westerly side--on One Hundred and Sixtieth Street, near St. Nicholas Avenue--stands almost the sole American memorial to a super-woman. It takes the shape of a colonial dwelling, two and a half stories high, white, crowned by a railed gazebo, and with rear extensions and columns and the rest of the architectural fantasies wherein our new-world ancestors rejoiced. It is called the Jumel mansion, after Madame Jumel, although it originally belonged to Mary Morris, an earlier and more beautiful man-slayer, at whose dainty feet George Washington, with solemn, but futile, protestations, deposited his heart; and although the woman whose name it bears ended her days there, not as Madame Jumel, but as Mrs. Burr. The house once stood far in the silent country. But the thin, throbbing island's life crawled northward inch by inch, until to-day the mansion crouches, miscast and bewildered, amid a forest of new and top-heavy flat houses--happy hunting ground for none-too-rich homeseekers--and is shaken by the jar of "L" and New York Central trains. Poor old house! Bewigged and small-clothed Great-gran'ther Peregrine, from Pompton, caught in the screaming eddy of a subway rush-hour crowd at the Grand Central! So much for rhapsody. The Jumel place is worth it. For there ghosts walk--the stately, lavender-scented old villains and villainettes who made up New York's smart set a century and a quarter ago, when flats were called "rookeries" and polite folk would scarce mention such things.