He remained silent. Into his mind, just for a second, and while in the act of setting the glass to his lips, there had flashed a flicker of pale clairvoyance. It seemed to illumine something within him which he had never believed in--another self. For that single instant he caught a glimpse of it, then it faded like a spark in a confused dream. He raised his head and looked gravely across at Strelsa Leeds; and level-eyed, smiling, inquisitive, she returned his gaze. Could this brief contact with her have evoked in him a far-buried something which had never before given sign of existence? And could it have been anything resembling aspiration that had glimmered so palely out of an ordered and sordid commonplace personality which, with all its talent for frivolity, he had accepted as his own? Without reason a slight flush came into his cheeks. "Why do you regard me so owlishly?" she asked, amused. "I repeat that you made me feel as though we were performing a sort of solemn rite when we drank our toast." "You couldn't feel that way with such a thoroughly frivolous man as I am. Could you?" "I'm rather frivolous myself," she admitted, laughing. "I really can't imagine why you made me feel so serious--or why you looked as though you were. I've no talent for solemnity. Have you?" "I don't think so," he said. "What a terrible din everybody is making! How hot and stifling it is here--with all those cloying gardenias.... A man said, this evening, that this sort of thing makes for anarchy.... It's rather beastly of me to sit here criticising my host's magnificence.... Do you know--it's curious, too--but I wish that, for the next hour or two, you and I were somewhere alone under a good wide sky--where there was no noise. It's an odd idea, isn't it, Mrs. Leeds. And probably you don't share it with me." She remained silent, thoughtful, her violet-gray eyes humorously considering him. "How do you know I don't?" she said at last. "I'm not enamoured of noise, either." "There's another thing," he went on, smiling--"it's rather curious, too--but somehow I've a sort of a vague idea that I've a lot of things to talk to you about. It's odd, isn't it?" "Well you know," she reminded him, "you couldn't very well have a lot of things to talk to me about considering the fact that we've known each other only an hour or so." "It doesn't seem logical.... And yet, there's that inexplicable sensation of being on the verge of fairly bursting into millions of words for your benefit--words which all my life have been bottled up in me, accumulating, waiting for this opportunity." They both were laughing, yet already a slight tension threatened both--had menaced them, vaguely, from the very first. It seemed to impend ever so slightly, like a margin of faintest shadow edging sunlight; yet it was always there. "I haven't time for millions of words this evening," she said. "Won't some remain fresh and sparkling and epigrammatic until--until----"