. She was so wholly without egoism that she would give herself up
without reservation and expect him to guide her. That would be all very
well with the ordinary woman; but with a nature of high ideals, and
possibly of transcendent passions,--was he equal to the task? But in his
present mood the prospect fascinated him. One of her slim hands, dark
but pretty, lay near his own. He wanted to take it in his, but did not:
he wished to keep her unself-conscious as long as possible.

He tried to talk to her about himself, but found it hard to avoid the
claptrap with which a man of the world attempts to awaken interest in
woman. He had always done it artistically: the weariness, the satiety,
the mental grasp of nothingness,--these had been ever revealed in
flashing glimpses, in unwilling allusiveness; the hope that he had
finally stumbled upon the one woman sketched with a brush dipped in
mist. But feeling himself sincere for the first time in incalculable
years, he dismissed the tempered weapons of his victories with contempt,
and, not knowing what others to substitute, talked of his boyhood and
college days. As a result, he felt younger than ever, and closer to the
girl who was part of the mystery that had taken him to her heart.

XXVIII

A woman's heart may be said to resemble a subterranean cavern to which
communication is had by means of a trap-door. How the lover enters this
guarded precinct depends upon the lover and the woman. Sometimes the
trap-door is jerked open, and he is hurled down with no by your leave,
gobbled up, willing or unwilling. Sometimes there is a desperate fight
just over the trap-door, in which he does sometimes, but not always,
come off victor. At other times he suddenly finds himself rambling
through those labyrinthine passages, to his surprise and that of the
woman, who, however, perceives him instantly. There is no such fallacy
as that a girl turns in terror or in any other sentiment from the
knowledge of this dweller below the trap-door. A woman of experience
may, after that first glimpse: she may, in fact, bolt the trap-door yet
more tightly and sit herself upon it. But a girl uses it as a frame for
her face and watches every movement of the occupant with neither fear
nor foreboding until occasion comes,--hanging the halls with the
tapestry of dreams, fitting the end of each rose-hued scented gallery
with the magic mirror of the future.

Magdalena, at the end of that morning in the wo