“I thought,” Wingrave remarked, accepting her invitation after a moment’s hesitation, “that we were to abandon it.”

“That was before dinner,” she answered, glancing sideways at him.  “I feel braver now.”

“You are prepared,” he remarked, “for unconditional surrender?”

She looked at him again.  She had rather nice eyes, quite dark and very soft, and she was a great believer in their efficacy.

“Of my argument?”

He did not answer her for a moment.  He had turned his head slightly towards her, and though his face was, as usual, expressionless, and his eyes cold and hard, she found nevertheless something of meaning in his steady regard.  There was a flush in her cheek when she looked away.

“I am afraid,” she remarked, “that you are rather a terrible person.”

“You flatter me,” he murmured.  “I am really quite harmless!”

“Not from conviction then, I am sure,” she remarked.

“Perhaps not,” he admitted.  “Let us call it from lack of enterprise!  The virtues are all very admirable things, but it is the men and women with vices who have ruled the world.  The good die young because there is no useful work for them to do.  No really satisfactory person, from a moral point of view, ever achieved greatness!”

She half closed her eyes.

“My head is going round,” she murmured.  “What an upheaval!  Fancy Mephistopheles on a steamer!”

“He was, at any rate, the most interesting of that little trio,” Wingrave remarked, “but even he was a trifle heavy.”

“Do you go about the world preaching your new doctrines?” she asked.

“Not I!” he answered.  “Nothing would every make a missionary of me, for good or for evil, for the simple reason that no one else’s welfare except my own has the slightest concern for me.”

“What hideous selfishness!” she said softly.  “But I don’t think—­you quite mean it?”

“I can assure you I do,” he answered drily.  “My world consists of myself for the central figure, and the half a dozen or so of people who are useful or amusing to me!  Except that the rest are needed to keep moving the machinery of the world, they might all perish, so far as I was concerned.”

“I don’t think,” Mrs. Travers said softly, “that I should like to be in your world.”

“I can very easily believe you,” he answered.

“Unless,” she remarked tentatively, “I came to convert!”

He nodded.

“There is something in that,” he admitted.  “It would be a great work, a little difficult, you know.”

“All the more interesting!”

“You see,” he continued, “I am not only bad, but I admire badness.  My wish is to remain bad—­in fact, I should like to be worse if I knew how.  You would find it hard to make a start.  I couldn’t even admit that a state of goodness was desirable!”

She looked at him curiously.  The night air was perhaps getting colder, for she shivered, and drew the rug a little closer around her.