"Is this an effort toward the justification of theft?" I inquired. For the first time I saw a touch of deeper color mark her cheek. I had been conscious of a certain duality in her mental equipment, just as I could detect a higher and lower plane in her manner of speech. "Not at all," she retorted. "I'm not talking of theft. And we may as well keep to cases. I don't think very much is ever gained by being impolite, do you?" I was compelled to agree with her, though I could not shake off the feeling that she had in some dim way scored against me. And this was the woman I had once feared would try to toy with my coat-buttons. "I'm afraid," she went on with her grave abstraction of tone, "that you'll find me very matter-of-fact. A woman can't see as much of the world as I have and then--oh! and then beat it back to the Elsie Books." I resented the drop to the lower plane, as though she had concluded the upper one to be incomprehensible to me. "Pardon me, madam; it's not my windmills I'm trying to be true to; it's one of my promises." "The promise was a very foolish one," she mildly protested. "Yet for all that," she added, as an afterthought, "you're intelligent. And I like intelligence." Still again her deep and searching eyes rested on my face. Her next words seemed more a soliloquy than a speech. "Yet you are doing this just to be true to your windmills. You're doing it out of nothing more than blind and quixotic generosity." The fact that my allusion had not been lost on her pleased me a little more, I think, than did her stare of perplexed commiseration. "Isn't is odd," she said, "how we go wrong about things, how we jump at conclusions and misjudge people? You think, at this very moment, that I'm the one who sees crooked, that I'm the one who's lost my perspective on things. And now I'm going to do something I hadn't the remotest intention of doing when you came into this room." "And what is that?" "I'm going to show you how wrong you've been, how wrong you are." "In what?" I inquired as she again sat in silence before me. "In everything," she finally answered, as she rose to her feet. I was at once more conscious of her physical appeal, of her inalienable bodily buoyancy, as I saw her standing there at her full height. The deep flow of color in her loosely draped gown gave her an almost pontifical stateliness. Instinctively I rose as she did. And I could see by her eyes that the courtesy was neither negligible nor distasteful to her. She was about to say something; then she stopped and looked at me for a hesitating moment or two. One would have thought, from the solemnity of that stare, that she faced the very Rubicon of her life. But a moment later she laughed aloud, and with a multitudinous rustling of skirts crossed the room and opened an inner door. Through this door, for a moment or two, she completely left my sight. Then she returned, holding a cabinet photograph in her hand.