“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.

She had the appearance of being frank, open, and lovable, just as she had that appearance of culture which every woman of her type gets from the cultivated class of men they prey upon.  Pet her, and she murmured softly in the king’s best English:  scratch her, and, like the rock that Moses struck, she burst forth in a surprising torrent.  Without making others merry, she was eternally merry.  Without ever feeling the agony of thirst, she instilled thirst.  A thousand broken-hearted women might have looked on her as an avenging sword, if the sword hadn’t been two-edged.  She had a motto, a creed, a philosophy, packed into four words:  “Be loved; never love.”

If both parts of this creed had not been equally imperative, Lewis might have escaped.  His aloofness was what doomed him.  Like all big-game hunters, Folly loved the rare trophy, the thing that’s hard to get.  By keeping his distance, Lewis pressed the spring that threw her into action.  Almost instinctively she concentrated on him all her forces of attraction, and Folly’s forces of attraction, once you pressed the spring, were simply dynamic.  Beneath that soft, breathing skin of hers was such store of vitality, intensity, and singleness of purpose as only the vividly monochromatic ever bring to bear on life.

Lewis, unconsciously in very deep waters indeed, reached London in a state of ineffable happiness.  Not so Folly.  Lewis had awakened in her desire.  With her, desire was merely the prelude to a natural consummation.  Folly was worried because one of the first and last things Lewis had said to her was, “Darling, when will you marry me?” To which she had replied, but without avail, “Let’s think about that afterward.”