“Do throw away that huge, hideous cigar,” she said, laughing. And she took two cigarettes from the box, put both between her lips, lit them, held one toward me. I looked at her face, and along her smooth, bare, outstretched arm, and at the pink, slender fingers holding the cigarette. I took it as if I were afraid the spell would be broken, should my fingers touch hers. Afraid--that's it! That's why I didn't pour out all that was in my heart. I deserved to lose her. “I'm taking you away from the others,” I said. We could hear the murmur of many voices and of music. In fancy I could see them assembled round the little card-tables--the well-fed bodies, the well-cared-for skins, the elaborate toilets, the useless jeweled hands--comfortable, secure, self-satisfied, idle, always idle, always playing at the imitation games--like their own pampered children, to be sheltered in the nurseries of wealth their whole lives through. And not at all in bitterness, but wholly in sadness, a sense of the injustice, the unfairness of it all--a sense that had been strong in me in my youth but blunted during the years of my busy prosperity--returned for a moment. For a moment only; my mind was soon back to realities--to her and me--to “us.” How soon it would never be “us” again! “They're mama's friends,” Anita was answering. “Oldish and tiresome. When you leave I shall go straight on up to bed.” “I'd like to--to see your room--where you live,” said I, more to myself than to her. “I sleep in a bare little box,” she replied with a laugh. “It's like a cell. A friend of ours who has the anti-germ fad insisted on it. But my sitting-room isn't so bad.” “Langdon has the anti-germ fad,” said I. She answered “Yes” after a pause, and in such a strained voice that I looked at her. A flush was just dying out of her face. “He was the friend I spoke of,” she went on. “You know him very well?” I asked. “We've known him--always,” said she. “I think he's one of my earliest recollections. His father's summer place and ours adjoin. And once--I guess it's the first time I remember seeing him--he was a freshman at Harvard, and he came along on a horse past the pony cart in which a groom was driving me. And I--I was very little then--I begged him to take me up, and he did. I thought he was the greatest, most wonderful man that ever lived.” She laughed queerly. “When I said my prayers, I used to imagine a god that looked like him to say them to.” I echoed her laugh heartily. The idea of Mowbray Langdon as a god struck me as peculiarly funny, though natural enough, too. “Absurd, wasn't it?” said she. But her face was grave, and she let her cigarette die out. “I guess you know him better than that now?” “Yes--better,” she answered, slowly and absently. “He's--anything but a god!” “And the more fascinating on that account,” said I. “I wonder why women like best the really bad, dangerous sort of man, who hasn't any respect for them, or for anything.”