forth. The guest was the liberty I had waited for all my life. I felt
indescribably free, light, strong. The tyranny of love, even while it
was but the love idea, that had shackled me for so many years, narrowing
my interests, warping my imagination, clouding the future, was
dissipated at last. I had paid the tribute to my youth and sex. I felt
really alive for the first time, existing in the actual not in the dream
world. There are women and women; and quite enough of the fine old
domestic order to keep the world going; but there is a vast and
increasing number that are never really alive and worth anything to
themselves or life until they have worked through that necessary
madness, buried it, and settled down to those infinite interests upon
which matrimony, happy or otherwise, bolts a thousand doors. Some day I
will tell you my theory of what such women are really born for, but you
have had enough for one night and the story is finished."

XI

Gwynne, between the fog and the story, felt congealed to the marrow. He
leaned his elbows on his knees and stared at the bottom of the boat. It
was the second time that the dark and carefully guarded recesses of the
human soul had been opened to him, but Zeal's at least were a man's, and
he had listened to him with a certain passive acceptance cut with
lightning-like visions of his own ruined future. He had never been
invited into a woman's crypts before, and he hardly knew whether he were
gratified or repelled. She had been as brutally truthful as he would
have expected her to be if she spoke at all, but he doubted if he
understood her as well as he had expected. He had been assured that she
had once at least possessed the capacity for intense feeling, but what
was the result? And were the depths frozen solid? Or merely buried
alive?

He remarked after a moment: "I cannot think of anything appropriate to
say, so perhaps it is as well to say nothing. I certainly do not feel
that you are in any need of my sympathies, for you are quite terribly
strong. When did all this happen?"

"About eight months before I went to England."

"What did you do with yourself in the interval?"

"I climbed in the Alps a bit, then went to Rome and studied the
Campagna, then travelled somewhat in Spain. By that time the desire for
California had grown insistent. The novelty of Europe had worn thin. I
was tired of playing at doing things, and only at home could I really
accomplish anyth