The friend assented. They strolled off together. At the hotel, the hall-porter gave Gerard a note which had just arrived. It was a line from Minna promising to be ready for the drive. He felt by no means displeased by his friend’s gossip; if anything, rather more settled in his mind. A beautiful and courted woman with several thousands a year commanded deference. The Queen of Sheba, of Monte Carlo scandal, on the other hand, was fair game. And the ease of the chase appealed to a man who was too masculine in his tastes to have cultivated the delicate gallantries of philandering. He crushed the note roughly into his pocket. “A put off?” queried his friend. “I guess not,” replied Gerard fatuously. CHAPTER XXIII Why Minna sent the note of acquiescence she herself could not tell. Her caprices were past accounting for. Vanity had its share. The man whom she had regarded as the most contemptuous and remote of a priggish society was now at her feet. Revenge prompted her to pay her ancient grudge against that society by kicking him as he grovelled. Again, desperate satiety drove her to new sensations. And lastly, a reaction from her expansiveness of the night before set her obstinately counter to Mrs. Delamere’s somewhat injudicious advice to remain within doors. She kept him waiting in the loggia for half an hour, while the ponies stamped and rattled their bits below. At last she appeared, dressed in her flaring daffodil-yellow costume, which she had not worn since her original encounter with him. She met him somewhat defiantly, without apology for her delay. “Do I look decent?” she enquired nonchalantly of Mrs. Delamere, who had been keeping Gerard company. “You look ripping,” said Gerard. She signed to him that she was ready to start. He picked up his hat and gloves from the balustrade and followed her downstairs, helped her into the high phaeton, took the reins from the man at the horses’ heads, and turned out of the front gate. Then a cut of the whip sent the ponies at a dashing pace down the Cimiez Road, through the town, towards the sea. “We will go Antibes way, along the coast,” said Gerard. “Anywhere except the Corniche road,” replied Minna. “I am sick of it.” “You seem to be sick of most things. Why so? You’ve got money and beauty and independence. What more can you want?” “Suppose I said I wanted somebody to understand me--some one whom I could meet soul to soul?” she said sarcastically. “Don’t you ever feel that?” He laughed, as he piloted the ponies past a company of bicyclists, at whose machines they seemed disposed to shy. “I’ve heard too much of that jargon,” he answered. “I’ve been cured of a belief in souls.” “Or if they do exist,” said Minna, “people only talk of them as they do of their livers--when they are diseased.” “You began talking of yours. Is it out of order? You try it a bit, don’t you?”