up until suddenly
she found herself suffocating. There was a moment of this tonight,
and Caroline rose and stood shuddering, looking about her in the blue
duskiness of the silent room. She had not been here at night before, and
the spirit of the place seemed more troubled and insistent than ever it
had in the quiet of the afternoons. Caroline brushed her hair back from
her damp forehead and went over to the bow window. After raising it
she sat down upon the low seat. Leaning her head against the sill, and
loosening her nightgown at the throat, she half-closed her eyes
and looked off into the troubled night, watching the play of the
heat-lightning upon the massing clouds between the pointed tops of the
poplars.

Yes, she knew, she knew well enough, of what absurdities this spell was
woven; she mocked, even while she winced. His power, she knew, lay not
so much in anything that he actually had--though he had so much--or
in anything that he actually was, but in what he suggested, in what he
seemed picturesque enough to have or be and that was just anything
that one chose to believe or to desire. His appeal was all the more
persuasive and alluring in that it was to the imagination alone, in that
it was as indefinite and impersonal as those cults of idealism which
so have their way with women. What he had was that, in his mere
personality, he quickened and in a measure gratified that something
without which--to women--life is no better than sawdust, and to the
desire for which most of their mistakes and tragedies and astonishingly
poor bargains are due.

D'Esquerre had become the center of a movement, and the Metropolitan
had become the temple of a cult. When he could be induced to cross the
Atlantic, the opera season in New York was successful; when he
could not, the management lost money; so much everyone knew. It was
understood, too, that his superb art had disproportionately little to do
with his peculiar position. Women swayed the balance this way or that;
the opera, the orchestra, even his own glorious art, achieved at such a
cost, were but the accessories of himself; like the scenery and costumes
and even the soprano, they all went to produce atmosphere, were the mere
mechanics of the beautiful illusion.

Caroline understood all this; tonight was not the first time that she
had put it to herself so. She had seen the same feeling in other people,
watched for it in her friends, studied it in the house night after ni