spiritual unrest . . . by dreams . . . mad longings. . . .

No one had ever surrendered to the illusion more completely than she.
No one had ever hunted with a more passionate determination for that
correlative soul that would submerge, exalt, and complete her own
aspiring soul. And what had she found? Men. Merely men. Satiety or
disaster. Weariness and disgust. She had not an illusion left. She
had put all that behind her long since.

It seemed to her as she sat there staring into the last flickerings of
the charred log that it had been countless years since any man had had
the power to send a thrill along her nerves, to stir even the ghost of
those old fierce desires. No woman had ever had more cause to feel
immune. Too contemptuous of life and the spurious illusions man had
created for himself, while destroying the even balance between matter
and mind, even to be rebellious, she had felt a profound gratitude for
her complete freedom from the thrall of sex when she had realized that
with her gifts of mind and fortune she still had a work to do in the
world that would resign her to the supreme boredom of living. During
the war man had been but a broken thing to be mended or eased out of
life; and she knew that there was no better nurse in Europe; it had
always been her pride to do nothing by halves; and before that she had
come to look upon men with a certain passive toleration when their
minds were responsive to her own. Whatever sex charm they possessed
might better have been wasted on the Venus in the Louvre.

And tonight she had realized that this young man, so unlike any she had
ever known in her European experience, had been more or less in her
thoughts since the night he had followed her out of the theatre and
stood covertly observing her as she waited for her car. She had been
conscious during subsequent nights at the play of his powerful gaze as
he sat watching for a turn of the head that would give him a glimpse of
something more than the back of her neck; or as she had passed him on
her way to her seat. She had been even more acutely conscious of him
as he left his own seat while the lights were still down and followed
her up the aisle. But she had felt merely amusement at the time,
possibly a thrill of gratified vanity, accustomed as she was to
admiration and homage.

But on the night when he had hastened up to her in the deserted street
and offered his assistance, standing with his hat in