“I know, I know.” The girl looked as if she did. “May I give you a cup of tea? You must be chilled.” “No, thank you. I am quite comfortable.” “Not even a cigarette? Oh, I wonder what you Victorian women did for a solace when you weren’t allowed even a cigarette!” You Victorian women! In spite of her tragic mood, a smile hovered on Margaret’s lips. So that was how this girl classified her. Yet Rose Morrison had fallen in love with a Victorian man. “Then I may?” said the younger woman with her full-throated laugh. From her bright red hair, which was brushed straight back from her forehead, to her splendid figure, where her hips swung free like a boy’s, she was a picture of barbaric beauty. There was a glittering hardness about her, as if she had been washed in some indestructible glaze; but it was the glaze of youth, not of experience. She reminded Margaret of a gilded statue she had seen once in a museum; and the girl’s eyes, like the eyes of the statue, were gleaming, remote and impassive—eyes that had never looked on reality. The dress she wore was made of some strange “art cloth,” dyed in brilliant hues, fashioned like a kimono, and girdled at the hips with what Margaret mistook for a queer piece of rope. Nothing, not even her crude and confident youth, revealed Rose Morrison to her visitor so completely as this end of rope. “You are an artist?” she asked, for she was sure of her ground. Only an artist, she decided, could be at once so arrogant with destiny and so ignorant of life. “How did you know? Has George spoken of me?” Margaret shook her head. “Oh, I knew without any one’s telling me.” “I have a studio in Greenwich Village, but George and I met last summer at Ogunquit. I go there every summer to paint.” “I didn’t know.” How easily, how possessively, this other woman spoke her husband’s name. “It began at once.” To Margaret, with her inherited delicacy and reticence, there was something repellent in this barbaric simplicity of emotion. “But you must have known that he was married,” she observed coldly. “Yes, I knew, but I could see, of course, that you did not understand him.” “And you think that you do?” If it were not tragic, how amusing it would be to think of her simple George as a problem! “Oh, I realize that it appears very sudden to you; but in the emotions time counts for so little. Just living with a person for twenty years doesn’t enable one to understand him, do you think?” “I suppose not. But do you really imagine,” she asked in what struck her as a singularly impersonal tone for so intimate a question, “that George is complex?”