d longed for would never be. He
had come, and she had let him go again....

How had it come about? Would she ever be able to explain it to herself?
How was it that she, so fertile in strategy, so practiced in feminine
arts, had stood there before him, helpless, inarticulate, like a
school-girl a-choke with her first love-longing? If he was gone, and
gone never to return, it was her own fault, and none but hers. What had
she done to move him, detain him, make his heart beat and his head
swim as hers were beating and swimming? She stood aghast at her own
inadequacy, her stony inexpressiveness....

And suddenly she lifted her hands to her throbbing forehead and cried
out: "But this is love! This must be love!"

She had loved him before, she supposed; for what else was she to call
the impulse that had drawn her to him, taught her how to overcome his
scruples, and whirled him away with her on their mad adventure? Well,
if that was love, this was something so much larger and deeper that the
other feeling seemed the mere dancing of her blood in tune with his....

But, no! Real love, great love, the love that poets sang, and privileged
and tortured beings lived and died of, that love had its own superior
expressiveness, and the sure command of its means. The petty arts of
coquetry were no farther from it than the numbness of the untaught
girl. Great love was wise, strong, powerful, like genius, like any other
dominant form of human power. It knew itself, and what it wanted, and
how to attain its ends.

Not great love, then... but just the common humble average of human love
was hers. And it had come to her so newly, so overwhelmingly, with a
face so grave, a touch so startling, that she had stood there petrified,
humbled at the first look of its eyes, recognizing that what she had
once taken for love was merely pleasure and spring-time, and the flavour
of youth.

"But how was I to know? And now it's too late!" she wailed.

XXIX

THE inhabitants of the little house in Passy were of necessity early
risers; but when Susy jumped out of bed the next morning no one else
was astir, and it lacked nearly an hour of the call of the bonne's
alarm-clock.

For a moment Susy leaned out of her dark room into the darker night.
A cold drizzle fell on her face, and she shivered and drew back. Then,
lighting a candle, and shading it, as her habit was, from the sleeping
child, she slipped on her dressing-gown and opened the door. On