“Flirting you call it—­flirting!  Look into your hearts.  God Himself hath looked into them and found flirtation the gateway to hell.  And I tell you that these army officers and the bedizened women, with their wine and cigarettes, with their devil’s calling-cards and their jewels, with their hell-lighted talk of the sacrilegious follies of socialism and art and horse-racing, O my brothers, it was all but a cloak for looking upon one another to lust after one another.  Rotten is this empire, and shall fall when our soldiers seek flirtation instead of kneeling in prayer like the iron men of Cromwell.”

Istra....  Card-playing....  Talk of socialism and art.  Mr. Wrenn felt very guilty.  Istra....  Smoking and drinking wine....  But his moral reflections brought the picture of Istra the more clearly before him—­the persuasive warmth of her perfect fingers; the curve of her backward-bent throat as she talked in her melodious voice of all the beautiful things made by the wise hands of great men.

He dashed out of the restaurant.  No matter what happened, good or bad, he had to see her.  While he was climbing to the upper deck of a bus he was trying to invent an excuse for seeing her....  Of course one couldn’t “go and call on ladies in their rooms without havin’ some special excuse; they would think that was awful fresh.”

He left the bus midway, at the sign of a periodical shop, and purchased a Blackwood’s and a Nineteenth Century.  Morton had told him these were the chief English “highbrow magazines.”

He carried them to his room, rubbed his thumb in the lampblack on the gas-fixture, and smeared the magazine covers, then cut the leaves and ruffled the margins to make the magazines look dog-eared with much reading; not because he wanted to appear to have read them, but because he felt that Istra would not permit him to buy things just for her.

All this business with details so calmed him that he wondered if he really cared to see her at all.  Besides, it was so late—­after half-past eight.

“Rats!  Hang it all!  I wish I was dead.  I don’t know what I do want to do,” he groaned, and cast himself upon his bed.  He was sure of nothing but the fact that he was unhappy.  He considered suicide in a dignified manner, but not for long enough to get much frightened about it.

He did not know that he was the toy of forces which, working on him through the strangeness of passionate womanhood, could have made him a great cad or a petty hero as easily as they did make him confusedly sorry for himself.  That he wasn’t very much of a cad or anything of a hero is a detail, an accident resulting from his thirty-five or thirty-six years of stodgy environment.  Cad or hero, filling scandal columns or histories, he would have been the same William Wrenn.

He was thinking of Istra as he lay on his bed.  In a few minutes he dashed to his bureau and brushed his thinning hair so nervously that he had to try three times for a straight parting.  While brushing his eyebrows and mustache he solemnly contemplated himself in the mirror.