eyed the impulse. I wanted to test it."

"Yes," he said, absorbed.

"I might have gone to the mountains or the sea, but some one would have
come and found me, and I should have been bound again--on the wheel.
I shouldn't have had the strength to resist. But here--have you ever
felt," she demanded, "that you craved a particular locality at a certain
time?"

He followed her still.

"That is how I felt. These associations, that Park, the thought of my
girlhood, of my mother, who understood me as no one else has since,
assumed a certain value. New York became unbearable. It is just there,
in the very centre of our modern civilization, that one sees the
crudest passions. Oh, I have often wondered whether a man, however
disillusioned, could see New York as a woman sees it when the glamour
is gone. We are the natural prey of the conqueror still. We dream of
independence--"

She broke off abruptly.

This confession, with the sudden glimpse it gave him of the fires within
her that would not die down, but burned now more fiercely than ever,
sent the blood to his head. His face, his temples, were hot with the
fierceness of his joy in his conviction that she had revealed herself
to him. Why she had done so, he could not say... This was the woman
whom the world thought composed; who had triumphed over its opposition,
compelled it to bow before her; who presented to it that self-possessed,
unified personality by which he had been struck at their first meeting.
Yet, paradoxically, the personality remained,--was more elusive than
before. A thousand revelations, he felt, would not disclose it.

He was no nearer to solving it now.. Yet the fires burned! She, too,
like himself, was aflame and unsatisfied! She, too, had tasted success,
and had revolted!

"But I don't get anywhere," she said wearily. "At times I feel this
ferment, this anger that things are as they are, only to realize what
helpless anger it is. Why not take the world as it appears and live and
feel, instead of beating against the currents?"

"But isn't that inconsistent with what you said awhile ago as to a new
civilization?" Hodder asked.

"Oh, that Utopia has no reality for me. I think it has, at moments, but
it fades. And I don't pretend to be consistent. Mr. Bentley lives in a
world of his own; I envy him with all my heart, I love and admire him,
he cheers and soothes me when I am with him. But I can't see--whatever
he sees. I am only aware of a remorseles