"Oh, well, console yourself," he said carelessly. "There are prettier women in the world than you, quantities of them!" "I--I--suppose so." Dita had rarely been so taken aback. She looked at him a moment like some insulted queen. His eyes, however, were discreetly downcast. "Oh, of course," she said as quickly as she could recover her breath, "of course," her laugh was forced and rang hollowly. "Oh, yes, don't let your beauty get on your nerves. The world is full of beautiful women. My new amulet--I told you that I had a new one, did I not?--was given me by one of the most beautiful women I ever saw. I have her picture somewhere. I must show it to you." Mr. Cresswell Hepworth was entirely without design in his choice of topics. He had spoken of some of his great western enterprises because his mind had been more or less occupied with them during the day, and had been so surprised and pleased that these subjects had gained his wife's interests that he had continued the discussion of them. Again, in his seeming disparagement of her beauty, he had merely thought to console her for what she regarded as the constant belittling of her mental endowment, evidently a sore spot in her consciousness. Dita played with her fork a moment without answering his last remark. She had no right to feel either resentment or irritation. Her sense of justice assured her of that, but she suffered a twinge of both emotions, nevertheless. "Wallace Martin tells me that good old Hewston made an awful scene when those distorted pictures of Fuschia Fleming and myself appeared in the paper." Hepworth laughed more heartily than usual. "Oh, do not mention that unspeakable old creature!" she cried petulantly. "Tell me of more interesting things." "Dita," he spoke to her more earnestly, more self-revealingly she felt than he had ever done before, "I am going to tell you something. When I went west last winter, it was not alone because I was called thither by various business affairs, but because, after thinking the matter all over, I definitely decided that the only thing for me to do was to relieve you of my presence. I was convinced that, although you might not be fully conscious of it, still in the depths of your heart you really loved Gresham. I was also convinced that I loved you infinitely, and that it was quite beyond my power to interest you. But since my return I find myself at sea. The moment I saw you I saw the difference in you, the change that made me revise my former crude, stupid estimates of you. I realize that you are the sort of woman who must have an object, a purpose in life, an expression; in fact, that you set little store by the beauty others praise extravagantly, because it has always been yours. You value it no more than one values the sun and wind. It is achievement that fascinates you, isn't it?"