From the night Overman had taken dinner at the Gramercy Park house he became a constant visitor.
For six months he had usually spent two or three evenings each week in his friend's library, rehearsing their boyhood days, discussing new books, art and politics, Socialism and religion.
Overman's cynicism had piqued Kate's curiosity and opened new views of things she had accepted as moral finalities.
At these battles of wit she was always a charmed listener. She seemed never to tire watching the sparks fly in the rapier thrust of mind in these two men of steel and listening with a shiver to the deep growl of the animal behind their words. The one, so homely he was fascinating, with massive neck, and enormous mouth pursing and twisting under excitement into a sneer that pushed his big nose upward, the incarnation of a battle-scarred bulldog; the other, with his giant figure, hands and feet, his leonine face and locks, his deep voice, handsome and insolent in his conscious strength, the picture of a thoroughbred mastiff.
With the grace of a goddess she would sit and
