I want to
strike down--deeper. It doesn't matter what point you take, so long
as you strike down. Just at present I'm off for India."

Her postscript said: "If you ever hear of me doing queer things,
remember they were all in the day's pleasure or the day's work."

He remembered--that Frida was only thirty-five; which was young for
Frida. And he said to himself, "It is all very well now, but what
will she be in another three years? I will give her another three
years. By that time she will be tired of the world, or the world
will be tired of her, which comes to the same thing, and her heart
(for she has a heart) will find her out. With Frida you never know.
I will wait and see."

He waited. The three years passed; he saw nothing and he had ceased
to hear. He concluded that Frida still loved the world.

As if in a passionate resentment against the rival that had
fascinated and won her, he had left off wandering and had buried
himself in an obscure Cornish village, where he gave himself up
to his work. He was not quite so successful as he had been; on
the other hand, he cared less than ever about success. It was the
end of the century, a century that had been forced by the
contemplation of such realities as plague and famine, and war and
rumors of war, to forego and forget the melancholy art of its
decadence. And from other causes Durant had fallen into a state
of extreme dissatisfaction with himself. Five years ago he had
found himself, as they said; found himself out, _he_ said, when
at the age of thirty-three he condemned himself and his art as
more decadent than the decadents. Frida Tancred had shown insight
when she reproached him with his inability to see anything that
he could not paint, or to paint anything that he could not see.
She had shown him the vanity of the sensuous aspect, she had
forced him to love the intangible, the unseen, till he had almost
come to believe that it was all he loved. The woman lived for him
in her divine form, as his imagination had first seen her, as an
Idea, an eternal dream. It was as if he could see nothing and
paint nothing else. And when a clever versatile artist of
Durant's type flings himself away in a mad struggle to give form
and color to the invisible it is not to be wondered at if the
world is puzzled and fights shy of him.

Meanwhile the critic who had a right to his opinion said of him:
"Now that he has thrown the reins on the back of his imagination it
will carr