nderstand if I should tell you. Men have no time for
subjectivities--except poets, psychological fictionists, and the like,
who do not seem to me men at all. Now, one reason I have liked you from
the first, in spite of many things that made my American blood boil, is
that you are a man, a real masculine arrogant dense man, with no
feminine morbid tendency to analyze your ego, in spite of your Celtic
blood. I met too many of that sort in Europe."

Gwynne, with his elbows on his knees, regarded the bottom of the boat
and colored guiltily, while congratulating himself that for all her
insight and cleverness she had barely penetrated his outer envelope. She
had thought him merely homesick, when his ego had been tottering, his
soul racked with doubt and terror; when he had spent long hours in
self-analysis; until the law had come to his rescue and reinvigorated
his brain. At the same time a wave of sadness swept over him. How little
human beings knew one another, no matter how intimate. As he raised his
eyes he seemed to see Isabel across a chasm as vast as the Atlantic; and
he was reminded that he knew her as little as she him. She had confessed
to the throes of what she believed to have been a great passion, but
when he had rehearsed the story away from the influence of her curious
cold magnetism and the sinister setting of its recital, he had
recognized it for what it was, the first violent embrace of an ardent
unshackled imagination with positive experience, in which the ego had
played an insignificant part. Her immediate recovery upon beholding the
disintegrating clay, without one regret for the vanished soul, or even
for the magnetic warmth of the living shell, suggested to his groping
masculine intelligence, totally unaccustomed to analysis of woman, that
her attack had been little more personal than if the man had infected
her with the microbe of influenza. Surely a woman that had loved a man
well enough to kiss him must have been stabbed with pity for the ardent
vigorous life thrust out into the dark. Then he felt a quick resentment
that anything so stainlessly statuesque as this girl--for all her trim
tailoring and large black hat--should have been even superficially
possessed by any man.

"Did that Johnny ever kiss you?" he asked, abruptly.

"Of course," replied Isabel. "Did I not have to, being engaged to him?
Not that there was much chance, for I never saw him alone between four
walls. Perhaps that was one rea