r own manner. She objected to supervision in any form, cast
aside criticism and declared roundly that she would lead her own life.
She realized sadly while she was doing it, however, that the best was
gone--that she had not had the wit or the stamina to do as she pleased
at the time she most wanted to do so. Now she would be almost
automatically conservative. She could not help it.

Eugene when he first met her felt something of this. He felt the
subtlety of her temperament, her philosophic conclusions, what might be
called her emotional disappointment. She was eager for life, which
seemed to him odd, for she appeared to have so much. By degrees he got
it out of her, for they came to be quite friendly and then he understood
clearly just how things were.

By the end of three months and before Christina Channing appeared,
Eugene had come to the sanest, cleanest understanding with Miss Finch
that he had yet reached with any woman. He had dropped into the habit of
calling there once and sometimes twice a week. He had learned to
understand her point of view, which was detachedly aesthetic and rather
removed from the world of the sensuous. Her ideal of a lover had been
fixed to a certain extent by statues and poems of Greek youth--Hylas,
Adonis, Perseus, and by those men of the Middle Ages painted by Millais,
Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown. She had hoped
for a youth with a classic outline of face, distinction of form,
graciousness of demeanor and an appreciative intellect. He must be manly
but artistic. It was a rather high ideal, not readily capable of
attainment by a woman already turned thirty, but nevertheless worth
dreaming about.

Although she had surrounded herself with talented youth as much as
possible--both young men and young women--she had not come across _the
one_. There had been a number of times when, for a very little while,
she had imagined she had found him, but had been compelled to see her
fancies fail. All the youths she knew had been inclined to fall in love
with girls younger than themselves--some to the interesting maidens she
had introduced them to. It is hard to witness an ideal turning from
yourself, its spiritual counterpart, and fixing itself upon some mere
fleshly vision of beauty which a few years will cause to fade. Such had
been her fate, however, and she was at times inclined to despair. When
Eugene appeared she had almost concluded that love was not for her, and