James was piqued. After all then she had not opened to him the door to her friendship. She was merely amusing herself with him as a provincial _pis aller._ Perhaps she saw his disappointment, for she added with a touch of warmth: “I'm glad you came. Truth is, I'm bored to death of myself.” “Then I ought to be welcome, for if I don't exorcise the devils of ennui you can now blame me.” “I shall. Try that big chair, and one of these Egyptians.” He helped himself to a cigarette and lit up as casually as if he had been in the habit of smoking in the lounging rooms of the ladies he knew. She watched him sink lazily into the chair and let his glance go wandering over the room. In his face she read the indolent sense of pleasure he found in sharing so intimately this sanctum of her more personal life. The room was a bit barbaric in its warmth of color, as barbaric as was the young woman herself in spite of her super-civilization. The walls, done in an old rose, were gilded and festooned to meet a ceiling almost Venetian in its scheme of decoration. Pink predominated in the brocaded tapestries and in the rugs, and the furniture was a luxurious modern compromise with the Louis Quinze. There were flowers in profusion--his gaze fell upon the American Beauties he had sent an hour or two ago--and a disorder of popular magazines and French novels. Farnum did not need to be told that the room was as much an exotic as its mistress. “You think?” her amused voice demanded when his eyes came back to her. “that the room seems made especially for you.” She volunteered information. “My uncle gave me a free hand to arrange and decorate it.” As he looked at her, smoking daintily in the fling of the fire glow, every inch the pampered heiress of the ages, his blood quickened to an appreciation of the sensuous charm of sex she breathed forth so indifferently. The clinging crepe-de-chine--except in public she did not pretend even to a conventional mourning for the scamp whose name she bore lent accent to her soft, rounded curves, and the slow, regular rise and fall of her breathing beneath the filmy lace promised a perfect fullness of bust and throat. He was keenly responsive to the physical allure of sex, and Valencia Van Tyle was endowed with more than her share of magnetic aura. “You have expressed yourself. It's like you,” he said with finality. Her tawny eyes met his confident appraisal ironically. “Indeed! You know then what I am like?” “One uses his eyes, and such brains as heaven has granted him,” he ventured lightly. “And what am I like?” she asked indolently. “I'm hoping to know that better soon--I merely guess now.” “They say all women are egoists--and some men.” She breathed her soft inscrutable ripple of laughter. “Let me hasten to confess, and crave a picture of myself.” “But the subject deserves an artist,” he parried. “He's afraid,” she murmured to the fire. “He makes and unmakes senators--this Warwick; but he's afraid of a girl.”