ts
were so mixed that it was impossible for women many times removed to
find favor in his eyes. Such he had met constantly, but not one had
ever drawn from him a superfluous heart-beat. Though there had been in
him a growing instinctive knowledge of lack of unity,--the lack of
unity which must precede, always, the love of man and woman,--not one
of the daughters of Eve he had met had flashed irresistibly in to fill
the void. Elective affinity, sexual affinity, or whatsoever the
intangible essence known as love is, had never been manifest. When he
met Frona it had at once sprung, full-fledged, into existence. But he
quite misunderstood it, took it for a mere attraction towards the new
and unaccustomed.

Many men, possessed of birth and breeding, have yielded to this clamor
for return. And giving the apparent lie to their own sanity and moral
stability, many such men have married peasant girls or barmaids, And
those to whom evil apportioned itself have been prone to distrust the
impulse they obeyed, forgetting that nature makes or mars the
individual for the sake, always, of the type. For in every such case
of return, the impulse was sound,--only that time and space interfered,
and propinquity determined whether the object of choice should be
bar-maid or peasant girl.

Happily for Vance Corliss, time and space were propitious, and in Frona
he found the culture he could not do without, and the clean sharp tang
of the earth he needed. In so far as her education and culture went,
she was an astonishment. He had met the scientifically smattered young
woman before, but Frona had something more than smattering. Further,
she gave new life to old facts, and her interpretations of common
things were coherent and vigorous and new. Though his acquired
conservatism was alarmed and cried danger, he could not remain cold to
the charm of her philosophizing, while her scholarly attainments were
fully redeemed by her enthusiasm. Though he could not agree with much
that she passionately held, he yet recognized that the passion of
sincerity and enthusiasm was good.

But her chief fault, in his eyes, was her unconventionality. Woman was
something so inexpressibly sacred to him, that he could not bear to see
any good woman venturing where the footing was precarious. Whatever
good woman thus ventured, overstepping the metes and bounds of sex and
status, he deemed did so of wantonness. And wantonness of such order
was akin