Her face changed. "Oh, but so am I!" she exclaimed, with a passion he had never seen or suspected in her before. She drew a long breath, closed her eyes and opened them very wide. "You don't know, you can't imagine, how I long to LIVE! And KNOW what 'to live' means." "Then why don't you?" he asked--he liked to catch people in their confidential moods and to peer into the hidden places in their hearts, not impudently but with a sort of scientific curiosity. "Because I'm a daughter--that's anchor number one. Because I'm a mother--that's anchor number two. Because I'm a wife--that's anchor number three. And anchor number four--because I'm under the spell of inherited instincts that rule me though I don't in the least believe in them. Tied, hands and feet!" "Inherited instinct." He shook his head sadly. "That's the skeleton at life's banquet. It takes away my appetite." She laughed without mirth, then sighed with some self-mockery. "It frightens ME away from the table." XV. GRADUATED PEARLS. But Scarborough declined her invitation. However, he did come to dinner ten days later; and Gladys, who had no lack of confidence in her power to charm when and whom she chose, was elated by his friendliness then and when she met him at other houses. "He's not a bit sentimental," she told Pauline, whose silence whenever she tried to discuss him did not discourage her. "But if he ever does care for a woman he'll care in the same tremendous way that he sweeps things before him in his career. Don't you think so?" "Yes," said Pauline. She had now lingered at Saint X two months beyond the time she originally set. She told herself she had reached the limit of endurance, that she must fly from the spectacle of Gladys' growing intimacy with Scarborough; she told Gladys it was impossible for her longer to neglect the new house in Fifth Avenue. With an effort she added: "You'd rather stay on here, wouldn't you?" "I detest New York," replied Gladys. "And I've never enjoyed myself in my whole life as I'm enjoying it here." So she went East alone, went direct to Dawn Hill, their country place at Manhasset, Long Island, which Dumont never visited. She invited Leonora Fanshaw down to stand between her thoughts and herself. Only the society of a human being, one who was light-hearted and amusing, could tide her back to any sort of peace in the old life--her books and her dogs, her horseback and her drawing and her gardening. A life so full of events, so empty of event. It left her hardly time for proper sleep, yet it had not a single one of those vivid threads of intense and continuous interest--and one of them is enough to make bright the dullest pattern that issues from the Loom. In her "splendor" her nearest approach to an intimacy had been with Leonora.