"I love beautiful dresses. I think this dress is beautiful. Have you noticed the line it makes from breast to hem, that long, unbroken line? I think that line the secret of elegance. In some gowns one sees one has visions of crushed ribs, don't you think?" Odd listened respectfully, his mouth twisted a little by that same smile that he still felt to be painful. "And is not this lace gathered around the shoulders pretty too?" Hilda turned to him for inspection. "You will talk about your clothes, but you will not talk about yourself, Hilda." Odd had put on his eyeglasses and was obediently studying her gown. "The lace is mamma's. Poor mamma; I know she is lonely. It does seem hard to be left alone when other people are enjoying themselves. She has Meredith's last novel, however. I began it with her. Mr. Odd, I am doing all the talking. _You_ talk now." "About Meredith, your dress, or you?" "About yourself, if you please." "It has seemed to me, Hilda, that you were even less interested in me than you were in yourself." Hilda looked round at him quickly, and he felt that his eyes held hers with a force which almost compelled her-- "No; I am very much interested in you." Odd was silent, studying her face with much the same expression that he had studied her gown--the expression of painfully controlled emotion. "There is nothing comparably interesting in me," he said; "I have had my story, or at least I have missed my chance to have a story." "What do you mean?" "Well, I mean that I might have made a mark in the world and didn't." "And your books?" "They are as negative as I am." "Yet they have helped me to live." Hilda looked hard at him while she spoke, and a sudden color swept into her face; no confusion, but the emotion of impulsive resolution. Odd, however, turned white. "Helped you to live, Hilda!" he almost stammered; "my gropings!" "You may call them gropings, but they led me. Perhaps you were like Virgil to Statius, in Dante. You know? You bore your light behind and lit my path!" She smiled, adding: "I suppose you think you have failed because you have reached no dogmatic absolute conclusion. But you yourself praise noble failure and scorn cheap success." "I didn't even know you read my books." "I know your books very well; much better than I know you." "Don't say that. I hope that any worth in me is in them." "One would have to survey your life as a whole to be sure of that. Perhaps you _do_ even better than you write." "Ah, no, no; I can praise the books by that comparison." His voice stumbled a little incoherently, and Hilda, rising, said with a smile-- "Shall we dance?" In the terribly disquieting whirl of his thoughts, which shared the dance's circling propensities, Odd held fast to one fixed kernel of desire; he must hear from Hilda's lips why she had refused Allan Hope.