attempt to be turned into property, was an anomaly in Ditmar's
universe. He had not, of course, existed for more than forty years
without having heard and read of and even encountered in an acquaintance
or two the species of sex attraction sentimentally called love that
sometimes made fools of men and played havoc with more important
affairs, but in his experience it had never interfered with his sanity
or his appetite or the Chippering Mill: it had never made his cigars
taste bitter; it had never caused a deterioration in the appreciation
of what he had achieved and held. But now he was experiencing strange
symptoms of an intensity out of all proportion to that of former
relations with the other sex. What was most unusual for him, he was
alarmed and depressed, at moments irritable. He regretted the capricious
and apparently accidental impulse that had made him pretend to tinker
with his automobile that day by the canal, that had led him to the
incomparable idiocy of getting rid of Miss Ottway and installing the
disturber of his peace as his private stenographer.

What the devil was it in her that made him so uncomfortable? When in his
office he had difficulty in keeping his mind on matters of import; he
would watch her furtively as she went about the room with the lithe
and noiseless movements that excited him the more because he suspected
beneath her outward and restrained demeanour a fierceness he craved yet
feared. He thought of her continually as a panther, a panther he had
caught and could not tame; he hadn't even caught her, since she might
escape at any time. He took precautions not to alarm her. When she
brushed against him he trembled. Continually she baffled and puzzled
him, and he never could tell of what she was thinking. She represented a
whole set of new and undetermined values for which he had no precedents,
and unlike every woman he had known--including his wife--she had an
integrity of her own, seemingly beyond the reach of all influences
economic and social. All the more exasperating, therefore, was a
propinquity creating an intimacy without substance, or without the
substance he craved for she had magically become for him a sort of
enveloping, protecting atmosphere. In an astonishingly brief time he
had fallen into the habit of talking things over with her; naturally not
affairs of the first importance, but matters such as the economy of
his time: when, for instance, it was most convenient for him to