“Your own life, your own life!” he exploded again. “Why, you great, big, beautiful doll, that’s your own life--a doll’s life! When is a doll not a doll?” He got out of his chair and jerked his coat together at the throat. His lower jaw protruded; he looked through rather than at her, and his eyes were sick and tired. “Even your talk is the talk of an automaton; you haven’t an idea without a forest of quotation-marks around it,” he said. “If you weren’t so good-looking, you’d be a private in that big brigade of female nincompoops who write their soul-troubles to the author of the latest successful book. Your beauty removes you from that class--at least as long as I look at you.” He bowed to her, with an expression slightly resembling a sneer. “Your beauty makes you a temptation; for you’d soon be looking for another cage, or another doll’s house, and any man might be glad to feed you. If I weren’t so busy, and you weren’t so devoid of character, common sense, everything else that--” “Oh, you brute!” she cried, recoiling from the crassly material admiration in his eyes. “How dare you speak to me like that?” “Perfect!” He bowed with his hand on his heart. “I press the button, and you utter the absolutely obvious remarks. You are a masterpiece--such a doll as would grace any home of the middle of the last century. And my advice to you is to go back to your home and to your devoted husband. I take it for granted that he is devoted: the prices which you mechanical beauties command usually include devotion by the bucketful. But perhaps I’m unnecessarily harsh because I see you slipping through my fingers. Good day, Mrs. Wendell; and good luck!” She saw him go with a feeling that the universe had suddenly been inverted and that she was scrambling around amid a Noah’s ark load of displaced properties. It was not so much that he had disturbed her ideals, her plans, her dream of freedom, but that he could have treated her so cavalierly; that he could have been so impolite, so unreasonable, so brutal; that he could so completely have failed to understand her--that was what left her as dazed and terrified as a lost child. “Oh, he is a cad, a perfect beast!” she gasped to herself as she fled up the broad stairway to her room. She threw herself down on the hard little bed, crumpled silks, crumpled hair, crumpled rose-petals of cheeks, crumpled pansies-and-dew of eyes. All her sweetness and delicacy wilted and drooped and quivered in the cold, gathering gloom of the little room. The city snarled and rumbled and hissed and groaned outside, and its great composite voice was the voice of loneliness incarnate. “Oh, there’s no one to take care of me!” she sobbed suddenly, and burst into a flood of tears. [Illustration] [Illustration: Half-tone plate engraved by H. Davidson A CORNER OF THE TABLE FROM THE PAINTING BY CHARLES CHABAS (EXAMPLES OF CONTEMPORARY FRENCH ART)] [Illustration: Drawn by André Castaigne