he enjoyed his position as a bachelor who was the most favored man in
the army too much to think of marriage. This did not imply an absence of
fondness for women; rather the contrary. He liked sitting next to a
beautiful neck and shoulders and having a pair of feminine eyes sparkle
into his at dinner; though, with rare exceptions, not the same neck and
shoulders on succeeding nights. His natural sense of organization
divided women into two classes: those of family and wealth, whom he met
at great houses, and those purring kittens who live in small flats. Both
afforded him diversion. A woman had been the most telling influence in
making him vice-chief of staff; an affair to which gossip gave the
breath of scandal had been an argument against him.

It was a little surprising that the bell that the girl of seventeen had
rung in his secret mind when he was on one of the first rounds of the
ladder, now lost in the mists of a lower stratum of existence, should
ever tinkle again.... Yet he had heard its note in the tone of her
prophecy with each step in his promotion; and while the other people
whom he had known at La Tir were the vaguest shadows of personalities,
her picture was as definite in detail as when she said: "You have the
will! You have the ambition!" She had recognized in him the power that
he felt; foreseen his ascent to the very apex of the pyramid. She was
still unmarried, which was strange; for she had not been bad-looking and
she was of a fine old family. What was she like now? Commonplace and
provincial, most likely. Many of the people he had known in his early
days appeared so when he met them again. But, at the worst, he looked
for an interesting half-hour.

The throbbing activity of the streets of the capital, as his car
proceeded on the way to her hotel, formed an energetic accompaniment to
his gratifying backward survey of how all his plans had worked out from