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