He had gone too far, this he admitted promptly and without consideration—­another minute of her bewildering charm and he felt, with a shiver, that he might have blundered irretrievably into a declaration of love.  What a fool he had been, after all, and where was the result of his painfully acquired caution—­of his varied experiences with many women?  Before entering her doors he had told himself emphatically that the thing should go no further than a pleasant friendship, and yet an hour later he had found his thoughts fairly wallowing in sentiment.  To like a woman and not make love to her—­was that dream of his purer desires still beyond him—­still in the distant region of the happier impossibilities?  Marriage had few allurements for him—­the respect he felt for it as an institution was equalled only by the disgust with which he regarded it as a personal condition; and a shudder ran through him now as he imagined himself tied to any woman upon earth for the remainder of his days.  Without being unduly proud in his own conceit, he was clearly aware that he might be looked upon through worldly eyes as a desirable match—­as fair game for a number of wary marriageable maidens; and it did not occur to him that even Laura herself might by any choice of her own, still stand hopelessly beyond his reach.  The thing that troubled him was the knowledge of his own impetuous emotions—­with the shield of Madame Alta withdrawn was it not possible that a sudden passion might plunge him headlong even into the abyss of marriage?

“What a consummate, what an unteachable ass I am,” he thought as he stared moodily at the passing cabs, “and the odd part of it is that the newest attraction always brings with it a fatal belief in its own permanence.  I have been madly in love a dozen times since I left college and yet it seems impossible to me that what I now feel has ever had a beginning or can ever have an end.  By Jove, I could almost swear that I’ve never gone through this before.”  Then he remembered suddenly one of Laura’s most characteristic movements—­the swift turn of her profile as she averted her face—­and he tried to imagine the quickened sensation with which he might have stooped and kissed the little violet shadow on her neck.  “Pshaw!” he exclaimed with angry determination, “does a man never get too old for such rubbish?  Am I no better than one of the dotards who hold on to passion after they have lost their teeth?” But in spite of his contemptuous cynicism it seemed to him that he was more in earnest than he had ever been in his life before.  There had been nothing so grave—­nothing so destructive as this in the impulse which had driven him to Madame Alta.

Gerty was awaiting him alone in her sitting-room upstairs, and as he entered, she stretched out her hands with a gesture of reproachful eagerness.

“You’re so late that I’ve barely a half hour before dressing,” she said.

“Why, in heaven’s name, didn’t you write me sooner?” he enquired, as he threw himself into a chair beside the couch on which she lay half buried amid cushions of pale green satin, “it was a mere accident that I had this spare time on my hands.  Where’s Perry?”