t was a picture he looked at often, and the more he looked the greater
was his desire, to see Frona Welse again. This event he anticipated
with a thrill, with the exultancy over change which is common of all
life. She was something new, a fresh type, a woman unrelated to all
women he had met. Out of the fascinating unknown a pair of hazel eyes
smiled into his, and a hand, soft of touch and strong of grip, beckoned
him. And there was an allurement about it which was as the allurement
of sin.

Not that Vance Corliss was anybody's fool, nor that his had been an
anchorite's existence; but that his upbringing, rather, had given his
life a certain puritanical bent. Awakening intelligence and broader
knowledge had weakened the early influence of an austere mother, but
had not wholly eradicated it. It was there, deep down, very shadowy,
but still a part of him. He could not get away from it. It distorted,
ever so slightly, his concepts of things. It gave a squint to his
perceptions, and very often, when the sex feminine was concerned,
determined his classifications. He prided himself on his largeness
when he granted that there were three kinds of women. His mother had
only admitted two. But he had outgrown her. It was incontestable that
there were three kinds,--the good, the bad, and the partly good and
partly bad. That the last usually went bad, he believed firmly. In
its very nature such a condition could not be permanent. It was the
intermediary stage, marking the passage from high to low, from best to
worst.

All of which might have been true, even as he saw it; but with
definitions for premises, conclusions cannot fail to be dogmatic. What
was good and bad? There it was. That was where his mother whispered
with dead lips to him. Nor alone his mother, but divers conventional
generations, even back to the sturdy ancestor who first uplifted from
the soil and looked down. For Vance Corliss was many times removed
from the red earth, and, though he did not know it, there was a clamor
within him for a return lest he perish.

Not that he pigeon-holed Frona according to his inherited definitions.
He refused to classify her at all. He did not dare. He preferred to
pass judgment later, when he had gathered more data. And there was the
allurement, the gathering of the data; the great critical point where
purity reaches dreamy hands towards pitch and refuses to call it
pitch--till defiled. No; Vance Corliss