aloofness. She wasn't
like this--she was different from all other women. It was ridiculous
that he should be so sure that she was different when his only proof was
a portrait, quite certainly idealized. He began to argue with himself
again as to whether he ought to seek her out and endanger her serenity
by telling her about Lord Dawn. It would be useless to confide such
intentions to Maisie. He would obtain no help from her. She could
conceive of no sympathy between a man and woman into which sex did not
enter. The thought of sex in connection with Lady Dawn seemed an
impertinence.

The discussion went on. Luncheon was at an end. Coffee had been served.
Cigarettes were being lighted. Again and again he was referred to. Did
he think this and didn't he agree to that? Wasn't this true of the way
in which men regarded women? Their differences of opinion seemed so
trivial. Their views so immature and amateurish. He watched them with
curious, brooding attention. They were so nobly tender in their outward
forms. He appreciated the grace of their gestures, the fine-boned
smallness of their bodies, the delicacy of their molding, the tendril
thinness of their fingers, the sagacity of their tiny aristocratic
heads, the seduction of their soft red mouths, the poetry of the fringe
of golden lashes in which the pathos of their eyes hung enmeshed--their
intrusive, penetrating frailty, which supplicated, denounced and
astounded. They were so weak and yet so strong. A man could crush them
with one arm. But they could slay a man's soul with their sweetness.
They were equipped in every detail by their pale perfection to quicken
and to disappoint. To disappoint! That was what they had been trying to
persuade him for the past half-hour--that they were Nature's traps,
cunningly contrived and baited. _The Philistines be upon thee, Samson!_
Their self-traductions were undermining his faith in all sacredness.

In the silence of his brain he fought--fought against disillusion,
claiming exemption for at least one woman from these sweeping
denunciations--the woman in the portrait.

A man had been passing and repassing the windows, cut into triangles by
the looped back, marigold-tinted curtains. At first he had mistaken him
for a different man each time he had passed. Then the lazy certainty had
grown up within him that it was always the same man. A man who wanted
something--wanted something that was in that house. It wasn't possible
to make out