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 want to answer that question you asked me," she supplemented.

"Well, I certainly wish you would! I've asked it twenty times tonight if I've asked it once. Why you should have lied like that to Cecily is more than I can figure out."

"It wasn't a lie," said Yvonne.

She saw him wheel like one struck from behind. She dropped her eyes, preferring not to see the set of his face. "My dear boy," she said further, lightly, ironically, "what I told Cecily was quite true. I'm not going to marry you. Not now, nor ever. You haven't enough money."

Still she did not look at him. But she knew he looked at her, and her flair for the theatrical was a help and a protection. She flicked the ashes from her cigarette, laid her head against the back of the divan, and put the holder between her lips again. The whole gesture was indolent; and her little smile gave no sign that behind it her teeth gripped vise-like on the bit of jade.

"In this newspaper job," she continued, "you'll probably begin on a salary of thirty or forty dollars a week—if you're lucky. I had an allowance of seven hundred a week when I lived with Demorest. Make your own deductions. I've made mine. I can't stand poverty, Jock Hamill. I thought I could, but I can't. I've tried it out for a year. . . . You see, you rather fascinated me. Your age fascinated me. I'm thirty-two. That surprises you, doesn't it? But it's a fact. And it pleased and flattered me that I should be able to make you—just a boy—love me. Nutriment to some women's vanity is requisite, you know. Especially at thirty-two. They'll go to any lengths to attain it. They'll even give up luxury, for a while, the way