A few years before he would have accepted a woman's confession that she smoked cigarettes as a confession of complete abandonment to all the other vices. A few years farther back, indeed, and he would have said that any man who smoked cigarettes was worthless. Since then he had seen so many burly heroes and so many unimpeachable ladies smoke them that he had almost forgotten his old prejudice. In some of the United States it was then against the law for men (not to say women and children) to sell or give away or even to possess cigarettes. After the war crusades would start against all forms of tobacco, and at least one clergyman would call every man who smoked cigarettes a "drug-addict." It is impossible for anybody to be moral enough not to be immoral to somebody. But intolerances go out of style as suddenly as new creeds come in. He knew soldiers who held a lighted stub in one hand while they rolled a cigarette with the other. He knew Red Cross saints who could puff a forbidden cigarette like a prayer. He wondered how he or any one had ever made such a fierce taboo of a wisp of aromatic leaves kindled in a tiny parcel. Such strange things people choose for their tests of virtue--tests that have nothing whatever to do with the case, whether savage or civilized folk invent them. He heard Miss Webling fumbling in a hand-bag. He heard the click of her rings against metal. He heard the little noise of the portals of a cigarette-case opening. His hands and hers stumbled together, and his fingers selected a little cylinder from the row. He produced a match and held the flame before her. He filled his eyes with her vivid features as the glow detached her from the dark. Of her eyes he saw only the big lids, but he noted her lips, pursed a trifle with the kissing muscles, and he sighed as she blew a smoke about her like a goddess creating a cloud of vanishment. He lighted his own cigarette and threw the match away. They returned to a perfect gloom mitigated by the slight increase and decrease in the vividness of their tobacco-tips as they puffed. She was the first to speak: "I have a whole box of fags in my hand-bag. I usually have a good supply. When you want another-- Does it horrify you to see a woman smoke?" He was very superior to his old bigotry. "Quite the contrary!" This was hardly honest enough, so he said: "It did once, though. I remember how startled I was years ago when I was in England and I saw ladies smoking in hotel corridors; and on the steamer coming back, there was a countess or something who sat in the balcony and puffed away. Of course, at the big dinners in London they smoked, too. They did at Sir Joseph's, I remember." He did not see her wince at this name.