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RV 139 Rader got up, set the tobacco jar on the table. "And she won't tell you where she saw it?"

"Tell! What do you think? She's got a will, that girl of yours!" Already he was teaching Rader about his daughter. "She would no more tell—" he tipped his head back, half closing his eyes, recalling her face under the shadow of the black cedars— "than if it were the sacred ibis and she its priest. Oh, I don't doubt she has seen something remarkable. I can believe that now. I can understand how she'd be jealous to keep it, if she wanted it for anything. To use it—but, man, that's the devil of it, she doesn't."

"The Ideal," Rader said gently. He looked down. and seemed to be speaking fragmentarily to himself. "Something that has never suffered and does not need to—something apart, unlike humanity." He addressed himself more directly to Carron, "I suppose there are no women in the world like the Venus of Melos, but we don't want to mar her because of that, do we?"

Carron brooded sulkily. "Yes, I can see the Ideal, fast enough; but your comparison is not quite true. The Venus of Melos is not a real woman."

"Isn't she?" The scholar thoughtfully rubbed the back of his hand against his long chin. "Do