The air was heavy with the scent of rockets and phlox and ragged pinks and candy-tuft. Through the sweet-scented dusky silence some small and very wakeful bird was trilling. Great misty-winged moths came whirring and hovering among the blossoms, pale blurs in the darkness, and everywhere the drifting lamps of fireflies lighted and died out against the foliage. The woman beside him sat with masked head bent and slightly turned from him; her restless hands worried her fan; her satin-shod feet were crossed and recrossed. "What is the matter?" he asked. "Life. It's all so very wrong." "Oh," he said, smiling, "so it's life that is amiss, not we!" "I suppose we are.... I suppose I am. But, Duane"--she turned and looked at him--"I haven't had much of a chance yet--to go very right or very wrong." "You've had chances enough for the latter," he said with an unpleasant laugh. "In this sweet coterie we inhabit, there's always that chance." "There are good women in it, good wives. Your sister is in it." "Yes, and I mean to take her out," said Duane grimly. "Do you think I want Naida to marry some money-fattened pup in this set?" "Where can you take her?" "Where I'm going in future myself--among people whose brains are not as obsolete as my appendix; where there still exist standards and old-fashioned things like principles and religion, and a healthy terror of the Decalogue!" "Is anybody really still afraid of the Decalogue?" she asked curiously. "Even we are, but some of us are more afraid of ennui. Fire and fear are the greatest purifiers in the world; it's fear of some sort or other, and only fear, that keeps the world as decent as it is." "I'm not afraid," she said, playing with her fan. "I'm only afraid of dying before I have lived at all." "What do you call living?" "Being loved," she said, and looked up at him. "You poor little thing!" he said, only partly in earnest. "Yes, I'm sorry for the girl I was.... I was rather a nice girl, Duane. You remember me before I married." "Yes, I do. You were a corker. You are still." She nodded: "Yes, outwardly. Within is--nothing. I am very, very old; very tired." He said no more. She sat listlessly watching the dusk-moths hovering among the pinks. Far away in the darkness rockets were rising, spraying the sky with fire; faint strains of music came from the forest. "Their Fete Galante has begun," she said. "Am I detaining you too long, Duane?" "No." She smiled: "It is rather amusing," she observed, "my coming to you for my morals--to you, Duane, who were once supposed to possess so few." "Never mind what I possess," he said, irritated. "What sort of advice do you expect?" "Why, moral advice, of course." "Oh! Are you on the verge of demoralisation?" "I don't know. Am I?... There is a man----"