"Oh, it must have been that he agrees with some dreadful person who said that poetry was the insanity of prose." Laura laughed as she glanced back at him, and he contrasted her deep contralto notes with Gerty's flute-like soprano.
"Well, he may not be right, but he is with the majority," she said.
Her indifference piqued him into the spirit of opposition, and he felt an immediate impulse to compel her reluctant interest--to arouse her admiration of the very qualities she now disdained.
"Well, I take my poetry where I find it," he rejoined, "and that's mostly in life and not in books." From the quick turn of her head, the instant's lifting of her emotional reserve, he saw that the words had arrested her imagination--that for the first time since her entrance she had really taken in the fact of his existence as an individual.
"Then you are not with the majority, but you are right!" she exclaimed.
"Is it not possible to be both ?" he asked, pleased almost more than he would admit by the quickening of her attention.
"I think not," she answered seriously, "don't you ?" "I never think," he laughed with his eyes upon hers, "I live." The animation, which was like the glow from an inner illumination, shone in her face, and he thought, as Trent had thought before him, that her soul must burn like a golden flame within her--a flame that reached toward life, knowledge and the veiled wonders of experience.
"And so would I if I were a man," she said.
She rose, clasping the furs at her throat, then folding Gerty in her arms she kissed her cheek.
"I stopped for a moment to look at you, nothing more," she confessed.
"It was a choice between looking at you and at the Rembrandt in the Metropolitan, and I chose you." As she held Gerty from her for an instant and then drew her into her embrace again, Kemper saw that her delight in her friend's beauty was almost a rapture, that her friendship possessed something of a religious fervour.
"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.