“Do stay with me,” pleaded Gerty; “I want you—­I need you.”

“But you dine out.”

“Oh, I forgot.  Wait, I’ll break it.  I’ll be ill.”

Laura smiled her refusal and, stooping, picked up her large, fluffy muff.

“I’ll come to-morrow,” she returned, “and it won’t cost us a lie.  Good bye, my bonnie, what do you wear?”

Gerty waved her hands in a gesture of unconcern.

“It rests with the fates and with Annette,” she replied.  “Green, blue, white; I don’t care.”

“But I do,” persisted Laura; “let it be white.”  She looked at Kemper and bowed silently as she turned toward the door; then, hesitating an instant, she came back and held out her hand with a cordial smile.  “It has been very pleasant to meet you,” she said.

“Mayn’t I at least see you down?” he asked.  “How do you go?”

“There’s really no need to trouble you,” she answered, “I shall go a part of the way in the stage.”

She went out, and as he followed her down the staircase he asked himself again the puzzling question:  “She is different from other women—­but how is she different?” And still he assured himself with confidence that what he liked in her was her serene separateness from the appeal of passion.  “This is the thing that lasts—­that really lasts for a lifetime,” he said in his thoughts.

CHAPTER VIII

PROVES THAT A POOR LOVER MAY MAKE AN EXCELLENT FRIEND

That night in her sitting-room, while she corrected the proof-sheets of her new book of verse, Laura remembered Kemper’s face as he sat across from her on the long seat of the almost empty stage.  Beyond him was the humming city, where the lights bloomed like white flowers out of the enveloping dusk, and when he turned his profile, as he did once, against a jeweller’s window, she saw every line of his large, strongly marked features silhouetted with distinctness on a brilliant background.  Twice during the ride down she had been conscious, as when they left Gerty’s house together, that he was more masculine than any man she had known closely in her life, and at first she had told herself that his nervous activity—­the ardent vitality in his appearance—­was too aggressive to be wholly pleasing.  She had been used to a considerate gentleness from men, and his manner, though frankly sympathetic, had seemed to her almost brusque.

Even now, while she laid her work aside to think of him, she was hardly sure that his genial egoism had not repelled her.  Her instinct told her that he could be both kind and generous, that he was capable of unselfish impulses, and full, too, of a broad and tolerant humanity, yet there was something within her—­some finer spiritual discernment—­which rose to battle against the attraction he appeared to possess.  He was not mental, he was not even superficially bookish, and yet because of a certain magnetic quality—­a mere dominant virility—­she found herself occupied, to the exclusion of her work, with the words he had uttered, with the tantalising humour in his eyes.