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 "Can't we be friends without swapping biographies?"

Jock smiled. "You're the only woman I ever met in my life who didn't like to talk about herself," he told her.

"I do like to, in the abstract," said Yvonne. "I like to talk about my theories and philosophies. But where I was born, and what I do, and how I live—those things I refuse to discuss. Discussing them bores me."

"Tell me about your ideas, then."

Yvonne put her chin on her hands and looked at him reflectively—almost mockingly, Jock fancied. "You won't like them," she said at last. "They're pagan."

"I'll love them," he retorted. "They're yours."

Yvonne began. "Well, for one thing, I don't believe in God. Nor religion. Nor any hereafter. I put no more faith in the Bible than I would in a—a bedtime story! When I die I expect to be through, permanently and positively. Hence—carpe diem. I want to try everything once before I die—everything, however wicked. As a matter of fact what's wicked and what isn't? Who knows? Do you? Do the smug little men up in pulpits? Why do you think old people's eyes are sad, Jock Hamill? Do you think they're sad with repentance? I think they're sad with uncommitted sins."

All this poured from her lips in short staccato sentences, each one of them a lash across Jock's mind. He was aroused and fascinated.

"And when I do die," she continued, "I want to die the way I've lived. Sensationally." (As the girl on the ferry, thought Jock.) "If I were a man I'd be a racing-driver. I love the way they die. At the wheel. Expecting to, more or less, and not caring. I knew one who was killed a year or two ago. He had one con-