my brightest hours. At night one should see everything more calmly, but I can't see this thing clearly, and there are some enormous shadows on my past. But if in the depths of my conscience I don't believe this is worse, why am I ashamed to tell? Was it worse?"

I did not understand her, but seized by acuto agitation impossible to conceal, I began to tremble as if in a nightmaro. I did not dare look down that path opening before us, now full of darkness and terror, nor could I close my eye a to it. Her voice, which had grown lower and had broken with deeper and deeper sorrow, suddenly steadied, and in a tone quite clear and normal she said: "You remember when my poor friend Dorothy was caught with that (woman) singer whose name I have forgotten" (I was happy at this change óf subject, which I hoped would side-track us from the recital of her own troubles), "how you explained to me then that we ought not to judge her harshly. I can recall your very words: 'How can we condem habits which Socrates, (that concerned men, of course, but isn't it the same thing?) Socrates who drank the hemlock rather than commit an injustice, cheerfully sanctioned among his close friends? Though fertile love, destined to keep the race alive, approved as a noble duty to family, society, and humanity, is superior to purely sensual passion, on the other hand there are no gradations among sterile loves, and it is not any less moral or rather not more immoral for a woman to find pleasure with another women than with someone of the other sex. The cause of such preference lies in tho nervous system, too exclusively to involve any moral significance. Ono can't say because most people call red objects red, that those who see them as violet aro

wrong.

"'And anyhow,' you added, if one refines passion in order to make it more esthetic, then since women's bodies and men's can be equally beautiful, one can't see why artistic women shouldn't fall in love with another woman. Among real artists physical attraction or repulsion is governed by regard for beauty. Most people recoil in disgust from jelly-fish. But Michelet, aware of the delicacy of their colors, collected them for pleasure. And in spite of my own initial dislike of oysters, after I had thought about their long journeys in the sea, (you told me that, too) 'which their flavor now evokes for me,