He looked round the room which was now hot, crowded, and noisy with the clink of glasses, and the babel of talk.
“Have you anything to do this evening? If not, will you come round to my club where we can smoke in peace?”
“I should like nothing better,” returned Dr. Dakin.
XVII
“I’m going to tell you the story of Anne Page as I know it,” said Fontenelle, as they sat in a corner of the almost deserted smoking-room. “You may hear all sorts of versions, and I should like you to listen now to the true one.”
He smiled, as he lighted a cigarette.
“You, also, are a student of psychology, doctor, and it has always seemed to me that Anne Page is a singularly interesting study.
“Nowadays in this age of modern thought, perhaps I should rather say in this age of fads and cranks, through which men and women are groping towards a different conception of life, her conduct would not have been so amazing.
“If she had been a modern woman, filled with the latest ideas of the sanctity of passion, whatever that may mean; the duty of leading her own life, and so forth, one might class her with a number of earnest feminine enthusiasts whose brains, like the old bottles of Scripture, are unequal to the strain of the new wine of recent ideas.”
“She doesn’t fit in there,” returned the doctor, smiling.