edevilments in the word "bunk."
The politer word, to be used chivalrously, was "neurasthenia." The
victims of these bedevilments were "nuts." A dreadful species like
herself, given to wrong hair cuts, insanities, outrages upon decency and
above all, common sense.

Hazlitt's attraction to Rachel in the face of her neurasthenia did not
confuse him. Confusion was a quality foreign to Hazlitt. He courted her
as a lover and proselyter. His proselyting consisted of vigorous
denunciations of the things which contributed to the neurasthenia of his
beloved. He declaimed his notions in round, rosy-cheeked sentences.
There was about Hazlitt's wooing of Rachel the pathos which might
distinguish the love affair of a Baptist angel and the hamadryad
daughter of a Babayaga.

Yet, though in her presence he denounced her art, taste, sufferings,
books, friends, affectations, away from her she came to him--beautiful
eyed and fragile--bringing a fear and a longing into his heart. Dreaming
of her over a pipe in his home at night, he saw her as something
bewilderingly clean, different--vividly different from other women, with
a difference that choked and saddened him. There was a virginity about
her that extended beyond her body. This and her fragility haunted him.
His youth had caught the vision of the night mist of her, the lonely
fields of her eyes, the shadow dreams toward whose solitudes she seemed
to be flying. Beside Rachel all other women were to him somehow coarse
and ungainly fibered, and somehow unvirginal.

Out of his dream of her arose his desire to have her as his own,
to come home and find her waiting, to have her known as Mrs.
George Hazlitt. The thought of the Rachel he knew--mysterious, fugitive,
neurasthenic--established normally across a breakfast table, smiling a
normal good-bye at him with her arms normally about his neck, was a
contrast that sharpened his desire. It offered a transformation that
would be a victory not only for his love but for the shining, militant
platitudes behind which Rachel had correctly pointed out to herself, he
lived.

* * * * * *

Bewildered in the lighted room, Rachel turned suddenly to the door.
Someone was knocking--loud. She hurried eagerly forward, wondering at
an unfinished thought ... "perhaps it is...." Hazlitt, smiling with
steady, solicitous eyes confronted her.

"I've been knocking for five minutes," he announced. "I heard you or I'd
have gone away."