"Is it Dante's Beatrice, Kelly? Where is Dante and his Aunty?" "God knows. They made a mess of it anyway, those two--andante--which I suppose this mess in marble symbolises. Pity he didn't have an aunty to tell him how." "Louis! How irreverent!" she whispered, eyes sparkling with laughter. "Shall I try a five-minute fashionable impromptu, dear?" he asked: "If Dante'd had an Aunty Who ante-dated Dante And scolded him And tolded him The way to win a winner, It's a cinch or I'm a sinner, He'd have taken Trix to dinner, He'd have given her the eye Of the fish about to die, And folded her, And moulded her Like dough within a pie-- sallow, pallid pie-- And cooked a scheme to marry her, And hired a hack to carry her To stately Harlem-by-the-Bronx, Where now the lonely taxi honks--" "Kelly!" she gasped. They both were laughing so that they hastened their steps, fearful of offending, and barely contrived to compose their features when making their adieux to Mrs. Hind-Willet and the Countess d'Enver. As they walked east along Fifty-ninth Street, breathing in the fresh, sparkling evening air, she said impulsively: "And to think, Louis, that if I had been wicked enough to marry you I'd have driven you into that kind of society--or into something genetically similar!" His face sobered: "You could hold your own in any society." "Perhaps I could. But they wouldn't let me." "Are you afraid to fight it out?" "Yes, dear--at _your_ expense. Otherwise--" She gazed smilingly into space, a slight colour in either cheek. CHAPTER XI Valerie West was twenty-two years old in February. One year of life lay behind her; her future stretched away into sunlit infinity. Neville attained his twenty-eighth year in March. Years still lay before him, a few lay behind him; but in a single month he had waded so swiftly forward through the sea of life that the shallows were already passed, the last shoal was deepening rapidly. Only immeasurable and menacing depths remained between him and the horizon--that pale, dead line dividing the noonday of to-day from the phantom suns of blank eternity. It was that winter that he began the picture destined to fix definitely his position among the painters of his times--began it humbly, yet somehow aware of what it was to be; afraid, for all his courage, yet conscious of something inevitable impending. It was Destiny; and, instinctively, he arose to meet it. He called the picture "A Bride." A sapphire sky fading to turquoise, in which great clouds crowded high in argent splendour--a young girl naked of feet, her snowy body cinctured at the waist with straight and silvered folds, standing amid a riot of wild flowers, head slightly dropped back, white arms inert, pendant. And in her eyes' deep velvet depths the mystery of the Annunciation.