rtant. It hurt his pride to think she
could so deliberately throw him over. Finally he began to be incensed,
and then Angela's fidelity appeared in a much finer light. There was a
girl who would not treat him so. She really loved him. She was faithful
and true. So his promised trip began to look much more attractive, and
by June he was in a fever to see her.

CHAPTER XXVI

The beautiful June weather arrived and with it Eugene took his departure
once more for Blackwood. He was in a peculiar mood, for while he was
anxious to see Angela again it was with the thought that perhaps he was
making a mistake. A notion of fatality was beginning to run through his
mind. Perhaps he was destined to take her! and yet, could anything be
more ridiculous? He could decide. He had deliberately decided to go back
there--or had he? He admitted to himself that his passion was drawing
him--in fact he could not see that there was anything much in love
outside of passion. Desire! Wasn't that all that pulled two people
together? There was some little charm of personality above that, but
desire was the keynote. And if the physical attraction were strong
enough, wasn't that sufficient to hold two people together? Did you
really need so much more? It was logic based on youth, enthusiasm and
inexperience, but it was enough to hold him for the time being--to
soothe him. To Angela he was not drawn by any of the things which drew
him to Miriam Finch and Norma Whitmore, nor was there the wonderful art
of Christina Channing. Still he was going.

His interest in Norma Whitmore had increased greatly as the winter
passed. In this woman he had found an intellect as broadening and
refining as any he had encountered. Her taste for the exceptional in
literature and art was as great as that of anyone he had ever known and
it was just as individual. She ran to impressive realistic fiction in
literature and to the kind of fresh-from-the-soil art which Eugene
represented. Her sense of just how big and fresh was the thing he was
trying to do was very encouraging, and she was carrying the word about
town to all her friends that he was doing it. She had even gone so far
as to speak to two different art dealers asking them why they had not
looked into what seemed to her his perfectly wonderful drawings.

"Why, they're astonishing in their newness," she told Eberhard Zang, one
of the important picture dealers on Fifth Avenue. She knew him from
having gone th