ere by-play of the intellect was to him the be-all and end-all of
existence. Of the books she had given him, he understood and
appropriated only those parts that related to his subject. All the
rest was lost: the literary quality, the atmosphere, the historic
perspective. To him it could never mean anything that Plato saw the
Parthenon.

This fact indicated a limitation, a reason why he could never develop
from the politician into the statesman, why, for example, she knew that
he was not the kind of man to become a cabinet officer or ambassador.
She would be merely the wife of a mayor, or at the most, of a governor
or representative. And she knew she would never respect his opinions,
that he was one who might champion crude and undigested theories,
theories which men trained as her father and Leigh and Cardington had
been trained would weigh in the balance and find wanting. How rashly
she had condemned this training, how effectually her experiment had
cured her of radicalism, she herself now saw clearly. The problem of
liberty within conventionality was still unsolved, and she had beaten
her wings against the bars in vain.

On the other hand, just as she had once endowed Emmet with
possibilities he never possessed, so now, in her disillusion, she lost
sight of those primitive virtues that would always make him a force for
good in whatever level he was destined to reach. Unjust to him in the
beginning, she was unjust to him still.

Felicity Wycliffe was a mystery to herself no less than to others. The
normal functions of her sex had dropped so far below her ken, in the
course of her complicated development, as to seem negligible.
Beginning with this negation, she had passed rapidly on to an attitude
of universal scepticism, to which religion was merely a matter of
taste, and prayer was a psychological phenomenon. She was not one to
lend herself to the constructive dreams of men, or to attach herself to
their theories. Her weariness of her father's academic plans presaged
her disillusion in regard to Emmet's career, even if he had been what
she first imagined him. Her colossal egotism demanded everything from
a man, and was prepared to give nothing in return, except the
precarious possession of herself. Yet what man, fascinated by the
mysterious unrest and nocturnal splendour of her eyes, would not gladly
pay for that possession whatever price she might demand?

Presently, when their silence had again beco