accustomed to young men who talked in a
fantastic manner. She answered placidly: "Yes. I am half Norwegian."

"Your name, then, is really yours?--your untamed, yet intimate, name. It
is like a wild bird that feeds out of one's hand."

"Yes; it is really mine. It is quite a common name in Norway."

"Wild birds are common," Mr. Drew observed, smiling softly.

He found her literalness charming. He was finding her altogether
charming. From the moment that she had appeared at the door in the dusk,
with her white, blind, searching face, she had begun to interest him.
She was stupid and delightful; a limpid and indomitable young creature
who, in a clash of loyalties, had chosen, without a hesitation, to leave
the obvious one. Also she was married yet unawakened, and this, to Mr.
Drew, was a pre-eminently charming combination. The question of the
awakened and the unawakened, of the human attitude to passion,
preoccupied him, practically, more than any other. His art dealt mainly
in themes of emotion as an end in itself.

The possibilities of passion in Madame von Marwitz, as artist and
genius, had strongly attracted him. He had genuinely been in love with
Madame von Marwitz. But the mere woman, as she more and more helplessly
revealed herself, was beginning to oppress and bore him.

He had amused himself, of late, by imaging his relation to her in the
fable of the sun and the traveller. Her beams from their high, sublime
solitudes had filled him with delight and exhilaration. Then the
radiance had concentrated itself, had begun to follow him--rather in the
manner of stage sunlight--very unflaggingly. He had wished for intervals
of shade. He had been aware, even during his long absence in America, of
sultriness brooding over him, and now, at these close quarters, he had
begun to throw off his cloak of allegiance. She bored him. It wasn't
good enough. She pretended to be sublime and far; but she wasn't sublime
and far; she was near and watchful and exacting; as watchful and
exacting as a mistress and as haughty as a Diana. She was not, and had,
evidently, no intention of being, his mistress, and for the mere
pleasure of adoring her Mr. Drew found the price too high to pay. He did
not care to proffer, indefinitely, a reverent passion, and he did not
like people, when he showed his weariness, to lose their tempers with
him. Already Madame von Marwitz had lost hers. He did not forget what
she looked like nor what she said on t