The safety match that resists all other friction needs only the touch of
its peculiar mate to break into flame. And many chemical compounds,
including souls, change their behavior and expose their secret
identities when they meet just the right--or the just the
wrong--reagent.
Persis Cabot was the wonder of her world for being at the same time so
cordial and so cold, so lightly amused, so extravagant, and yet
apparently so immune to the follies of passion. She was thought to be
incapable of losing either her head or her heart. Mrs. Neff called her
"fireproof."
Willie Enslee was universally accepted as her fiance, simply because his
wealth and his family's prestige were greater than anybody's else in her
circle. This made him the logical candidate. Everybody knew that he was
mad about Persis in his petty way. But nobody expected Persis to fall
madly in love with Willie, or to let that failure keep her from marrying
him.
And now Forbes appeared from the wilderness and strange influences began
to work upon her. She began to study the man with increasing interest.
She resented his effect upon her, and could not resist it. He was like a
sharp knife, or a loaded revolver, or the edge of a cliff, quiet and
unpursuing, yet latent with danger, terrifying and therefore
fascinating.
Hitherto she had played with firearms and danced along abysses and
juggled daggers in many a flirtation, but always she had kept her poise
and felt no danger. Now she was just a trifle startled by a feeling of
insecurity.
Many men had made ferocious love to her, had tried to set up a
combustion in her heart, had threatened her with violence, with murder
and with suicide; and she had laughed at them, laughed them back to the
sanity she had never lost.
But this man Forbes made no campaign against her. If he pressed her too
hard in the dance he apologized at once. He seemed to be at her mercy,
and yet she felt that he brought with him some influence stronger than
both. He was like one of Homer's warriors attended by a clouded god or
goddess bent on his victory or his destruction--she could not tell
which. When she caught him gazing at her devouringly he looked away, yet
she found herself looking away, too, and breathing a little faster.
Scores of men had embraced her as she danced with them and some of them
had muttered burning love into her ear. But they left her cold. This man
said little or less, and he held her almost shyly; yet she felt a
strange kindling in his touch, saw in his eye a smoldering.
In this last dance with him a panic of helplessness had confounded her.
He had whirled her about till she had lost all sense of floor and
ceiling. She felt herself falling and spinning down the gulfs of space
in a nightmare of rapture. She would have swooned had he not seen how
white and lost she was and stopped short. She had felt that other people
were staring and making comments.
She was afraid to dance with him again. When she had regained her
self-control she made a pretext to escape out of the lateness of the
hour and the necessity of dressing for dinner and the opera.
There was an almost hysterical flippancy in her chatter. In spite of the
protestations of the three men, she insisted on paying the bill. It was
her own party, she said. The waiter looked sad at this, but what she
left on the plate tempered his despair of her sex.
She offered to drop Forbes and Ten Eyck at their destinations, and they
clambered into her car with Winifred and Bob. Forbes was all too soon
deposited at his hotel, where the footman and the starter hailed Persis
with affectionate homage and Forbes with a new courtesy because of her.
Forbes lingered at the curb to watch her away. As the landaulet sped
toward Fifth Avenue all he saw of her was the fluttering white
interrogation-mark.