He took her hand and felt of it, testing its quality and texture, preparing himself for his speech. Her hand was long and slim, with scarcely a fiber more flesh upon the bones than was necessary to cover them admirably. He had no thought at first except to give his ordinary routine of reading, but his study of her showed her to be an exceptional character. She was beautiful, with the loveliness of an aristocratic and slightly bewildering spiritual type. Her hand in his was magnetic, delicious of contact, subtly alive even though not consciously responsive. Other women with more obvious charm had left him cold. She, aided by no suggestion of coquetry or complaisance, allured him. She awakened in him a desire not wholly physical, although he could not fail to regard her primarily in the sex relation that, so far, had been his chief interest in women. She, as a woman, answered, in some secret way, him, as a man. This was his first wave of feeling. Her hint amused him, true as her intuition had been; she had stumbled upon his embarrassment, no doubt, and had claimed prescience, a common enough form of feminine conceit. There he had a valuable suggestion as to the direction of her line of least resistance to his wiles. Following upon this, as the first feeling of her unreality faded, upon contact, came the thought of her as a wealthy and credulous girl, who might minister to his ambitions. He was without real social aspirations, except in so far as his success in the fashionable world favored the game he was playing. Years of contact with credulity and hypocrisy had carried him, mentally, too far to value the lionizing and the hero-worship he had tasted from his smarter clients. But the patronage of such a fair and finished creature as this girl, especially if he could establish a more intimate relation, might secure the permanence of his position and his opportunities. He saw vistas of delight and satisfaction in such an acquaintance. He had had his fill of silly women whose favors were paid for in ministrations to their vanity. Such tribute, easy as it was for him with his facility, irked him. Here, perhaps, was one who might hold his interest by her fineness and her mentality, and by the very difficulty he might find in impressing her. There would be zest to the pursuit. Beneath these waves of feeling, however, and beneath his active intelligence, there was an inchoate disturbance in some subconscious stratum of his mind. He felt it only as the slight mental perplexity the mole upon her cheek had caused; he had no time, now, to pursue that incipient idea. His impression of her as a desirable, pleasurable quarry incited him to devise the psychological method necessary for her capture. He knew to a hair, usually, what he could do with women; but now he was forced to gain time by a preamble in the conventional patter of the palmist’s cult.