Mlle. Folly Delaires was not born within a stone's throw of the Paris fortifications, as her manager would have liked you to believe, but in an indefinite street in Cockneydom, so like its mates that, in the words of Folly herself, she had to have the homing instinct of a pigeon to find it at all. Folly's original name had been--but why give it away? She was one of those women who are above and beyond a name--of a class, or, rather, of a type that a relatively merciful world produces sparingly. She was all body and no soul. From the moment that Lewis kissed Folly, and then kissed her several times more, discovering with each essay depths in the art which even his free and easy life had never given him occasion to dream of, he became infatuated--so infatuated that the following dialogue passed over him and did not wake him. "Why are you crying?" asked Lewis, whom tears had never before made curious. "I'm crying," gasped Folly, stamping her little foot, "because it's taken so _long_!" Lewis looked down at her brown head, buried against his shoulder, and asked dreamily: "Are you spirit and flower, libertine and saint?" To which Folly replied: "Well, I was the flower-girl once in a great hit, and I played 'The Nun' last season, you remember. As for spirits, I had the refusal of one of the spirit parts in the first "Blue Bird" show, but there were too many of them, so I turned it down. I'd have felt as though I'd gone back to the chorus. Libertine," she mused finally--"what _is_ a libertine?" Lewis's father could have looked at Folly from across the street and given her a very complete and charming definition for a libertine in one word. But Lewis had not yet reached that wisdom which tells us that man learns to know himself last of all. He did not realize that your true-born libertine never knows it. Whatever Folly's life may have been, and he thought he had no illusions on that score, he seized upon her question as proving that she still held the potential bloom of youth and a measure of innocence. To do her justice, Folly was young, and also she had asked her question in good faith. As to innocence--well, what has never consciously existed, causes no lack. Folly's little world was exceedingly broad in one way and as narrow in another, but, like few human worlds, it contained a miracle. The miracle was that it absolutely satisfied her. She dated happiness, content, and birth itself from the day she went wrong.