"Yes, but think how many times we can love!" the rouged lips laughed back at him. Hartley moved on through the crush. "A woman's eyes," a long-haired young man at his elbow was declaring to a group of listening women, "a woman's eyes are the index of her soul." An elderly lady in mauve caught him up. "But our souls, you see, are like the magazines--they mostly come uncut. And that's why only the paper-knife of matrimony really finds us out." Hartley looked at the group, crestfallen, disappointed, vaguely disgusted. Their brilliance seemed to him the brilliance of tinsel and paper roses. And he asked himself in sudden indeterminate terror if this was the sort of thing he was to waste his days over. CHAPTER IX THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODDESS She from her rose-grown turrets came And laughed up in his eyes; He flushed to his pale brow with shame, And spake unto the skies: "To Christ this woman yet shall bow, Or be cast down," he said, "And where she flaunts her scarlet now Shall float the Cross instead." JOHN HARTLEY, "The Broken Knight." Put a touch of spring in the air, the thought of a woman in the heart, and keep from poetry if you can.--"The Silver Poppy." For the second time Cordelia Vaughan had left Hartley stunned and amazed. Twice since he had first met her he looked up in bewilderment and found it necessary to readjust his estimate of her. This second readjustment, though, was somewhat different from the first. It was not until he had left her (receiving her homage like the acknowledged and imperious young queen she was) that once more back in his dingy little lodging, stiflingly squalid after the richness of the Spauldings' crowded drawing-room, he had untied the blue silk ribbon that so daintily bound the manuscript of her second book. To lose himself in it would be a relief. He was glad to slip away into the unreal world which her hand had opened up to him. Cordelia had named her story The Unwise Virgins. With the open manuscript once before him, Hartley read it through, from start to finish. And it was from that reading he emerged stunned and amazed. The Unwise Virgins was a failure, a glittering but disheartening failure. Of that there could be no two opinions. The streets of the city had not been so kind to Cordelia Vaughan as had the open hills of Kentucky. Her second book had none of the power and movement of The Silver Poppy, none of those whimsical tendernesses and quaint touches of humor and pathos that had half muffled the razor edge of her earlier satiric touch.