be. Doubtless there must be
limits, not only to the tolerance of Weston Marchmont and of society,
but to everything else except infinity. But there are great expanses,
wide spaces, short of infinity. When she walked out of her first cage,
the one which her mother's careful fingers had kept locked on her, she
would like not to walk into another, but to escape into some park or
forest, not boundless, yet so large as to leave room for exploring, for
the finding of new things, for speculation, for doubt, excitement,
uncertainty, even for the presence of apprehension and the possibility
of danger. As she surveyed the manner in which she was expected to pass
her life, the manner in which she was supposed (she faced now the common
interpretation of her conduct this evening) already to have elected to
pass it, she felt as a speculator feels towards Consols, as a gambler
towards threepenny whist. It seemed as though nothing could be good
which did not also hold within it the potency of being very bad, as
though certainty damned and chance alone had lures to offer. She would
have liked to take life in her hand--however precious a thing, what use
is it if you hoard it?--and see what she could make of it, what usury
its free loan to fate and fortune would earn. She might lose it; youth
made light of the risk. She might crawl back in sad plight; the Prodigal
Son did not think of that when he set out. She found herself wishing she
had nothing, that she might be free to start on the search for anything.

Like Quisante? Why, yes, just like Quisante. Like that strange,
intolerable, vulgar, attractive, intermittently inspired creature, who
presented himself at life's roulette-table, not less various in his own
person than were the varying turns he courted, unaccountable as chance,
baffling as fate, changeable as luck. Indeed he was like life itself, a
thing you loved and hated, grew weary of and embraced, shrank from and
pursued. To see him then was in a way to look on at life, to be in
contact with him was to feel the throb of its movement. In her midnight
musings the man seemed somehow to cease to be odious because he ceased
to be individual, to be no longer incomprehensible because he was no
longer apart, because he became to her less himself and more the
expression and impersonation of an instinct that in her own blood ran
riot and held festivity.

"I'm having moments, like Mr. Quisante himself!" she said with a sudden
laugh.