Then I left her. I had not any inclination just now to pursue my fair Elena. Rather I sat alone in my new bedroom, thinking, confusedly, first of Amelia Van Orden, and how I danced with her a good eight years ago; of that woman who had come to me in remote Fairhaven, coming through the world's gutter, unsullied,--because that much I yet believe, although I do not know.... She may have been always the same, even in the old days when Lichfield thought her "fast," and she was more or less "compromised,"--and years before I met her, a blind, inexperienced boy. Only she may then have been a better actress than I suspected.... I thought, in any event, of those execrable rhymes that likened her to the Lady in _Comus_, moving serene and unafraid among a rabble of threatening bestial shapes; and I thought of the woman who would, by this time, be with Von Anspach. For here again were inbred Lichfieldian traditions of the sort I rarely dare confess to, even to myself, because they are so patently hidebound and ridiculous. These traditions told me that this woman, whom I had loved, was Von Anspach's harlot. I might--and I did--endeavor to be ironical and to be broadminded and to be up-to-date about the whole affair, and generally to view the matter through the sophisticated eyes of the author of The Apostates, that Robert Etheridge Townsend who was a connoisseur of ironies and human foibles; but these futilities did no good at all. Lichfield had got at and into me when I was too young to defend myself; and I could no more alter the inbred traditions of Lichfield, that were a part of me, than a carpet could change its texture. My traditions merely told me that the dear woman whom I remembered had come--in fleeing from discomforts which were unbearable, if that mattered--to be Von Anspach's harlot: and finding her this, my traditions declined to be the least bit broadminded. In Lichfield such women were simply not respectable; nor could you get around that fact by going to Liege. There was in the room a _Matin,_ which contained a brief account of the burning of the Continental, and a very lengthy one of the Neroni's appearance the night before. Drearily, to keep from thinking, I read a deal concerning _la gracieuse cantatrice americaine._ Whether or not she had made a fool of me with histrionics in Fairhaven, there was no doubt that she had chosen wisely in forsaking Lethbury, and the round of village "Opera Houses." She had chosen, after all, and precisely as I had done, to make the most of youth while it lasted; and she appeared, just now, to harvest prodigally.