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r the microscopic eye of the mind. What did he know of himself? He asked the question again as he sat in his own deep chair in the early morning hours. The heat in the hotel had been turned off and he had lit the gas logs in the grate--symbol of the artificialities of civilization that had played their insidious role in man's outer and more familiar personality. Perhaps they struck deeper. Habit more often than not dominated original impulse. His own room, where he was nearly always alone, with its warm red curtains and rug, the low bookcases built under his direction and filled with his favorite books, the refectory table and other pieces of dark old English oak that he had brought from home, and several family portraits on the wall, restored his equilibrium and his brain was abnormally clear. He wondered if he ever would sleep again. Better think it over now. Mary Zattiany as she talked had never changed her expression. She might have been some ancient oracle reciting her credo, and she seemed to have narcotized that magnetic current that had always vibrated between them. Nevertheless, he had been fully aware that she felt like nothing less than an oracle or the marble bust she looked, and that her soul was racked and possibly fainting, but mastered by her formidable will. Formidable. Did that word best express her? Was she one of the superwomen who could find no mate on earth and must look for her god on another star? He certainly was no superman himself to breathe on her plane and mate that incarnate will. Had she any human weakness? Even that subterranean sex-life in her past had not been due to weakness. She was far too arrogant for that. Life had been her foot-stool. She had kicked it about contemptuously. Even her readjustments had been the dictates of her imperious will. And her pride! She was a female Lucifer in pride. No doubt the men she had dismissed had been secretly relieved; stung for the only time in their lives perhaps, with a sense of inferiority. It must have been like receiving the casual favors of a queen on her throne. Well, she had got it in the neck once; there was some satisfaction in that. He wished he knew the man's name. He'd hunt him up and thank him in behalf of his sex. For an hour he excoriated her, hated her, feared her, dissociating her from the vast army of womanhood, but congratulating himself upon having known her. She was a unique if crucifying st
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