PROVES THAT A POOR LOVER MAY MAKE AN EXCELLENT FRIEND That night in her sitting-room, while she corrected the proof-sheets of her new book of verse, Laura remembered Kemper's face as he sat across from her on the long seat of the almost empty stage.

Beyond him was the humming city, where the lights bloomed like white flowers out of the enveloping dusk, and when he turned his profile, as he did once, against a jeweller's window, she saw every line of his large, strongly marked features silhouetted with distinctness on a brilliant background.

Twice during the ride down she had been conscious, as when they left Gerty's house together, that he was more masculine than any man she had known closely in her life, and at first she had told herself that his nervous activity--the ardent vitality in his appearance--was too aggressive to be wholly pleasing.

She had been used to a considerate gentleness from men, and his manner, though frankly sympathetic, had seemed to her almost brusque.
Even now, while she laid her work aside to think of him, she was hardly sure that his genial egoism had not repelled her.

Her instinct told her that he could be both kind and generous, that he was capable of unselfish impulses, and full, too, of a broad and tolerant humanity, yet there was something within her--some finer spiritual discernment--which rose to battle against the attraction he appeared to possess.