"You are?" he said. "Now that is entirely sensible, though I should scarcely call it a new departure. You know you tried it last winter, with the most satisfying results. When Lent came on you had lost several pounds in weight and all your color; you had refined existence until neither rest nor food appeared necessary to you, and the future was naturally full of promise. Be gay, by all means; you'll find it pay, I assure you. Go to a lunch-party at one, and a reception at four, a dinner in the evening, and drop in at a German or so on your way home, taking precautions at the same time against neglecting your calling-list in the intervals these slight recreations allow you. Oh, I should certainly advise you to be gay." "Laurence," she said, "do you think if one should do that _every_ day, _every_ day, and give one's self _no_ rest, that after a while it would _kill_ one?" He regarded her fixedly for an instant. "Do you want to die?" he asked, at last. She sat perfectly still, and something terribly like, and yet terribly unlike, a smile crept slowly into her eyes as they met his. Then she replied, without flinching in the least, or moving her gaze: "No." He held up a long, slender forefinger, and shook it at her, slowly, in his favorite gesture of warning. "No," he said, "you don't; but, even if you fancied you did, don't flatter yourself that it would happen. Shall I tell you what would occur? You would simply break down. You would lose your self-control and do things you did not wish to do; you would find it a physical impossibility to be equal to the occasion, and you would end by being pale and haggard--haggard, and discovering that your gowns were not becoming to you. How does the thing strike you?" "It is very brutal," she said, with a little shudder; "but it is true." "When you make ten remarks that are true," he returned, "nine of them are brutal. That is the charm of life." "I don't think," she said, with inconsequent resentment, "that you very much mind being brutal to me." "A few minutes ago you said I knew what was good for you," he responded. "You do," she said, "that is it, and it is only like me that I should hate you because you do. You must think," with a pathetic tone of appeal for herself in her voice, "that I do not mind being brutal to you; but I don't want to be. I don't want to do any of the things I am doing now." She picked up the bouquet of Jacqueminot roses she had been carrying and had laid down near her. "Don't talk about me," she said. "Let us talk about something else,--these, for instance. Do you know where they came from?" "I could scarcely guess." "Senator Planefield sent them to me." He regarded them in silence. "They match the dress," she said, "and they belong to it." "Yes," he answered, "they match the dress." Then he was silent again. "Well," she said, restlessly, "why don't you say something to me?" "There isn't anything to say," he replied.