And now---- The mate of the eagle was a trifler with peacocks and
vultures. The man whose face had been molded by his last thought into an
expression of serene faithfulness, was recalled only as one who had
lived envenomed by disloyalty. Braithwaite, the aristocrat in courage,
was now distinguished for his cowardice; he himself was at one and the
same time Braithwaite's rival and grudging critic. _The Philistines be
upon thee, Samson! And he awoke out of his sleep and said, I will go out
as at other times and shake myself_----Asleep! He felt that he, too, had
been asleep. All the men who had been giants in the past five years were
either dead or sleeping. And this sudden transformation was the work of
women, because men had come back to walk and rest with them in the soft,
desired places. The little feminine hands had stripped them of their
charity, had taken away their valor and had concealed liers-in-wait in
the chamber of their affections.

So his thoughts ran on, amplifying, magnifying, exaggerating the theme
of the debilitating effects of women. But from all his accusations he
exempted Terry. She was the Joan of Arc of his imagination, who rode on
unvanquished across life's battlefields, inspiring to heroism with her
shining purity. And he made one other exception--Lady Dawn. It was the
Lady Dawn of the portrait he exempted, not the Lady Dawn who had mocked
him in passing with her steady stone-gray eyes. In a strange way he
discriminated between the portrait and the living woman. The portrait
was almost his friend; the living woman was a stranger. The woman in
the portrait was after his own heart; she had never been known to cry.
"Do it harder; I can bear more than that." He thrilled to the pride of
her defiance.

Then he pulled himself up with a start. Again he was thinking about her.
Yes, and though he might discriminate between the portrait and the
living woman, it was the living woman's eyes that gleamed in the
blackness of his mind. There was truth in what Maisie had said, that
were he as much in love with Terry as he professed all other women,
however beautiful, except the one woman, should be hanks of hair and
bags of bones. He consoled himself by arguing that that was precisely
what he had been trying to prove them by his sweeping applications of
the conduct of Delilah.

Whichever way he viewed his situation, things were in a pretty fair
muddle--a muddle which annoyed him because it was so unmerited. He w