“Do give us tea, mama,” said Anita. Her cold, sarcastic tone cut my nerves and her mother's like a razor blade. I looked sharply at her, and wondered whether I was not making a bargain vastly different from that my passion was picturing. XV. SOME STRANGE LAPSES OF A LOVER But before there was time for me to get a distinct impression, that ugly shape of cynicism had disappeared. “It was a shadow I myself cast upon her,” I assured myself; and once more she seemed to me like a clear, calm lake of melted snow from the mountains. “I can see to the pure white sand of the very bottom,” thought I. Mystery there was, but only the mystery of wonder at the apparition of such beauty and purity in such a world as mine. True, from time to time, there showed at the surface or vaguely outlined in the depths, forms strangely out of place in those unsullied waters. But I either refused to see or refused to trust my senses. I had a fixed ideal of what a woman should be; this girl embodied that ideal. “If you'd only give up your cigarettes,” I remember saying to her when we were a little better acquainted, “you'd be perfect.” She made an impatient gesture. “Don't!” she commanded almost angrily. “You make me feel like a hypocrite. You tempt me to be a hypocrite. Why not be content with woman as she is--a human being? And--how could I--any woman not an idiot--be alive for twenty-five years without learning--a thing or two? Why should any man want it?” “Because to know is to be spattered and stained,” said I. “I get enough of people who know, down-town. Up-town--I want a change of air. Of course, you think you know the world, but you haven't the remotest conception of what it's really like. Sometimes when I'm with you, I begin to feel mean and--and unclean. And the feeling grows on me until it's all I can do to restrain myself from rushing away.” She looked at me critically. “You've never had much to do with women, have you?” she finally said slowly in a musing tone. “I wish that were true--almost,” replied I, on my mettle as a man, and resisting not without effort the impulse to make some vague “confessions”--boastings disguised as penitential admissions--after the customary masculine fashion. She smiled--and one of those disquieting shapes seemed to me to be floating lazily and repellently downward, out of sight. “A man and a woman can be a great deal to each other, I believe,” said she; “can be--married, and all that--and remain as strange to each other as if they had never met--more hopelessly strangers.” “There's always a sort of mystery,” I conceded. “I suppose that's one of the things that keep married people interested.” She shrugged her shoulders--she was in evening dress, I recall, and there was on her white skin that intense, transparent, bluish tinge one sees on the new snow when the sun comes out.