gh
time, through youthful space, with her electrical lures, the natural
equipment of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, somewhere from
the unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the gulfs of air where
there had been no life before. But she can't be said to have knowingly
searched the void for any presence."

"Oh, I'm not sure about that, Professor," Minver put in. "Go a little
slower, if you expect me to follow you."

"It's all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life," Wanhope
resumed. "I don't believe I could make out the case as I feel it to be."

"Braybridge's part of the case is rather plain, isn't it?" I invited
him.

"I'm not sure of that. No man's part of any case is plain, if you look
at it carefully. The most that you can say of Braybridge is that he is
rather a simple nature. But nothing," the psychologist added, with one
of his deep breaths, "is so complex as a simple nature."

"Well," Minver contended, "Braybridge is plain, if his case isn't."

"Plain? Is he plain?" Wanhope asked, as if asking himself.

"My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!"

"I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of
unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek
proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel
the attraction of such a man--the fascination of his being grizzled and
slovenly and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to do
that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would
divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under
rather exceptional circumstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks,
where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop.
He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the
hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and
I don't vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found himself at
odds with the gay young people who made up the hostess's end of the
party, and was watching for a chance to--"

Wanhope cast about for the word, and Minver supplied it--"Pull out."

"Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from him."

"I don't understand," Rulledge said.

"When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an
excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he
saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence
of having