pyjamas, thrust his feet into
bedroom slippers and went out into the living-room. There he put a log
on the fire and paced up and down, not unlike a tiger round its cage.

He felt as if black bats were flying about his brain, each charged with
a different portent of disaster. Once more the unreality of the whole
affair overwhelmed him. How could he have been so fatuous as to
believe that he had really won such a woman? He remembered his first
impression: that she was on a plane above, apart. They hadn't an
interest in common, not even a memory that antedated their meeting a
few short weeks ago. She had lived a life of which he knew nothing
outside of European novels and memoirs. She had known nothing of any
other world until he had introduced her to his friends, and he made no
doubt that her interest in them was about as permanent as a highly
original comedy on the stage would inspire. There was nothing,
literally, between them but a mutual irresistible attraction, and that
bond recognized so unerringly by both.

That bond.

Would it hold?

Had this man offered her something that would make love seem
insignificant and trivial? She, who had had a surfeit of love long
since? Whose eyes had looked a thousand years old until he had given
her mind back its youth as the great Vienna biologist had rejuvenated
her body.

He was entirely indifferent to her old love affair with Hohenhauer. It
was those years of political association and mutual interdependence in
Vienna that he feared. He had, when he first met her, appraised her as
a woman to whom power was the breath of life. Ambition--in the grand
manner--incarnate. She had all the appearance and the air of a woman
to whom the wielding of power, however subtly, was an old story. He
recalled that that terrifying suggestion of concealed ruthless forces
behind those charming manners, those feminine wiles, had almost made
him resolve to "avoid her like the plague." And then he had fallen
madly in love with her and forgotten everything but the woman.

He had divined even before these last miraculous days that she had
looked upon love with abhorrence for almost half as many years as he
had lived, an abhorrence rooted in a profound revulsion of body and
mind and spirit. For nearly twenty years that revulsion had endured
and eaten into the very depths of her being. . . . He had a sudden
blaze of enlightenment. She had frequently alluded to that Lodge of
hers