suddenly, just to get away from it in the
mass. To renew my youth, if I could. The gardens were only an excuse.
I had come to a point where I wanted to be quiet, to be alone, to think,
and I knew my father would be going away. So much of my girlhood was
spent in that Park that I know every corner of it, and I--obeyed the
impulse. I wanted to test it."

"Yes," he said, absorbed.

"I might have gone to the mountains or the sea, but some one would have
come and found me, and I should have been bound again--on the wheel.
I shouldn't have had the strength to resist. But here--have you ever
felt," she demanded, "that you craved a particular locality at a certain
time?"

He followed her still.

"That is how I felt. These associations, that Park, the thought of my
girlhood, of my mother, who understood me as no one else has since,
assumed a certain value. New York became unbearable. It is just
there, in the very centre of our modern civilization, that one sees
the crudest passions. Oh, I have often wondered whether a man, however
disillusioned, could see New York as a woman sees it when the glamour is
gone. We are the natural prey of the conqueror still. We dream of
independence--"

She broke off abruptly.

This confession, with the sudden glimpse it gave him of the fires within
her that would not die down, but burned now more fiercely than ever,
sent the blood to his head. His face, his temples, were hot with the
fierceness of his joy in his conviction that she had revealed herself to
him. Why she had done so, he could not say. . . This was the woman
whom the world thought composed; who had triumphed over its opposition,
compelled it to bow before her; who presented to it that self-possessed,
unified personality by which he had been struck at their first meeting.
Yet, paradoxically, the personality remained,--was more elusive than
before. A thousand revelations, he felt, would not disclose it.

He was no nearer to solving it now. . Yet the fires burned! She, too,
like himself, was aflame and unsatisfied! She, too, had tasted success,
and had revolted!

"But I don't get anywhere," she said wearily. "At times I feel this
ferment, this anger that things are as they are, only to realize what
helpless anger it is. Why not take the world as it appears and live and
feel, instead of beating against the currents?"

"But isn't that inconsistent with what you said awhile ago as to a new
civilization?" Hodder asked.

"Oh, th