"Do I repel as a woman?" Isabel had placed one foot on the fender, one hand on the mantel-piece, and as she leaned slightly towards him, the red glow of the lamps and the mellow old scarf softening her features, the small square of neck dazzlingly white, and the position revealing the lines of her figure against the high flames of the logs, she looked more lovely than he had ever seen her. Like all racial beauties, bred by selection, she needed the arts of dress and furnishings to frame her. It is only your accidental or peasant beauty that can defy "clothes"; and Isabel's looks in ordinary ranch and riding costumes made no impression on Gwynne whatever. But to-night her appeal was very direct, although he had not the least idea whether she was posing or was entirely natural in an unusual mood. He had no intention of being made a fool of, however, and answered with the responsive glow in his eyes due a pretty and charming woman:
"Sometimes. Not to-night. If you would remain Spanish with no Revolutionary lapses, I make no doubt I should fall in love with you, and then perhaps you would fall in love with me merely because of my own lack of picturesqueness, and we should live happily ever after."
"What a bore." Isabel sniffed, and moved her gaze to the fire. But she did not alter her attitude.
"Are you really happy?" asked Gwynne, curiously.
"Of course. So much so that it begins to worry me a little. My puritanical instincts dictate that I have no right to be quite happy. What slaves we are to the old poisons in our blood! I live by the light of my reason, and all is well until one of those mouldy instincts, like a buried disease germ, raps all round its tomb. Then I feel nothing but a graveyard of all my ancestors. I don't let them out, and my reason continues its rule, but they keep me from being—well—entirely happy, and I resent that."
"I should say it was not the Puritans but your common womanly instincts that were thumping round their cells. You have no right to be happy except as Nature intended when she deliberately equipped you, and that is in making some man happy."
"That is one of those superstitions I am trying to live down while I am still young. Your mother is unhappy, under all her pride, because she has outlived youth and beauty and all they meant to her—she made them her gods, and now they have gone, and she doesn't know which way to turn. Ennui devours her, and she is too old to turn her brains to account, too cynical for the average resource of religion, and too steeped, dyed, solidified, in one kind of womanism to turn at this late date to any other. But there are so many resources for the woman of to-day. The poor despised pioneers have done that for us. Of course it has not killed our natural instincts, and if I had not fallen in love when I did, no doubt I should still be looking about for an opportunity. It is my good-fortune that I was delivered so soon. I wish all women born to enjoy life in its variety could be freed of that terrible burden of sex as early as I was."
"I suppose you would like to rid men of it too."
"I do not waste any thought on men; so far as I have observed they are able to take care of themselves."
"A woman incapable of passion is neither more nor less than a failure."