and then play upon his emotions and bring him back abruptly to her own charm, to realize her greater skill and agility in life, her rightness in the business of living and presenting a brave front to the world, and sometimes he would almost admit that she was right, and that, after all, since he could produce nothing definitely superior to her desire, he had better yield and give her those good things that, in their easy circumstances, they were privileged to enjoy--charm and excitement and pleasure. But he could not. Life had always been hard for him. He could not consent to have it easy. All that she fed on turned to bitterness in his mouth. He tried to tell her once of the tenderness his mother had given him on the night before he had come to her, the pure joy that, but for the omen at his heart, he had taken for a foretaste of the heaven he was to enter. She said: "She is a dear old woman, your mother." In the way she said it, in the purely sentimental interest she showed, he knew that all he had been talking of lay outside her world, and he remembered Kurt quoting with approval a remark some man had made: "Linda Brock has no back to her mind." It became a desperate longing with him to make her feel, to rouse her to a realization of the emptiness and coldness of her crowded, brilliant life. And he longed to be able to go to her and say: "See! This is hurting me here and here, and I am aching with the pain of it." If only she would come and show her hurt to him! His longing was often in his eyes as he looked at her, never in self-pity. He was as far from that as from judging her. She had changed him so; had so far estranged him from himself, from his little world of dreams and hopes, that in his first adoration of her, his innocent appreciation of her womanhood, he had so nearly conquered for his own.