avels and
work the stimulation that less serious, aimless men might seek in love.

When she read his books, there unrolled before her the esoteric corners
of the desert, the strange charm and depravity of little-known Oriental
cities, the deadly richness of equatorial forests, peopled by human
beasts whose claws were hammered steel, whose fangs were poisoned
arrows, and who carried in their thick skulls the condensed miasma of
their hiding places.

She seemed to see him passing through those physical dangers and
corroding mental influences, a superior being of unalterable health and
sanity, perhaps protected because of a grand destiny still unrevealed
to him. She longed to participate in that destiny, or, at any rate, to
be responsible somehow for it.

"Where are you? What are your thoughts?" she would whisper, staring at
the likeness of this peculiarly congenial stranger.

Late at night, at that hour when bizarre fancies and actions may seem
natural, she would ask him:

"Don't you know that I exist? Then I must make you know it."

So she tried to cast forth into space a flood of feeling strong enough
to reach him--a projection of her identity, her appearance, and her
infatuation. All her secret ardors that had never been so strongly
focused upon a definite personality found their centering point in him,
whose imagined nature seemed to be so emphatically what she needed to
appease and complete her nature. She was like one of those antique
sorceresses who would cast over distant hearts the spells that must
inevitably recoil upon their makers.

But when she had remained for a long while motionless and tense, she
rose wearily, with a low laugh of disillusionment and ridicule.

Little by little her thoughts of him were obscured by other thoughts,
by weakly apposite conjectures that had different men as their objects.
And when different men made love to her, once or twice, maybe at a
conjunction of exquisite scenery, music, and impatience, of confused
longings and eloquent persuasion, she was tempted to consent. But just
in time she stilled that tremulous smile, and averted that dizzy look
in the depths of which lurked a fatal sweetness.

Then, when life seemed to her unbearably monotonous, she went to a
week-end party at the Brassfields' house in the country.

CHAPTER V

The Brassfields' country house was copied from an historic French
chateau. In the drawing-room, the high walls, from which well-k