disease prematurely withered her. He sees
what he sees and if he is satisfied at all he is as completely
satisfied as a man may be.

He made no doubt that Mary Zattiany would have, if she chose, as many
suitors among men of his own age as among her former contemporaries.
They would discuss the phenomenon furiously, joke about it, try to
imagine her as she had been, back water, return out of curiosity,
hesitate, speculate--and then forget it.

No one would forget it sooner than himself. He had no doubt whatever
that when he went to her house tomorrow afternoon he would remember as
long as she kept him waiting and no longer. So that was that.

Did he want children? They charmed him--sometimes--but he had never
been conscious of any desire for a brood of his own. He knew that many
men felt an even profounder need of offspring than women. Man's ego is
more strident, the desire to perpetuate itself more insistent, his
foresight is more extended. Moreover, however subconsciously, his
sense of duty to the race is stronger. . . . But he doubted if any man
would weigh the repetition of his ego against his ego's demand to mate
with a woman like Mary Zattiany. He certainly would not. That was
final.

What was it she demanded in love, that she had sought so ardently and
ever missed? Could he give it to her? Was she merely glamored once
more, caught up again in the delusions of youth, with her revivified
brain and reawakened senses, and this time only because the man was of
a type novel in her cognizance of men? Useless to plead the urge of
the race in her case. . . . Nevertheless, many women, denied the power
of reproduction fell as mistakenly in love as the most fertile of their
sisters. But hardly a woman of Mary Zattiany's exhaustive experience!
She certainly should know her own mind. Her instincts by this time
must be compounded of technical knowledge, not the groping inherited
flashes playing about the shallow soil of youth. . . . If her
instincts had centred on him there must be some deeper meaning than
passion or even intellectual homology. After all, their conversations,
if vital, had been few in number.

Perhaps she had found, with her mind's trained antennae, some one of
those hidden layers of personality which she alone could reveal to
himself. What was it? She wanted far more than love-making and mental
correspondence. _What_ was it? He wished he knew. Tenderness? He
could give her that in