e was tired of it all. The mood
was transient, she knew. It would pass because it was alien to the clear
bracing air of her mind; but while it lasted she told herself that the
present had palled on her because she had looked beneath the vivid
surface of illusion to the bare structure of life. Men had ceased to
interest her because she knew them too well. She knew by heart the very
machinery of their existence, the secret mental springs which moved them
so mechanically; and she felt to-day that if they had been watches, she
could have taken them apart and put them together again without
suspending for a minute the monotonous regularity of their works. Even
Gideon Vetch, who might have held a surprise for her, had differed from
the rest in one thing only: he had not seen that she was beautiful! And
it wasn't that she was breaking. To-day because of her mood of
depression, she appeared drooping and faded; but that night, a week ago,
in her velvet gown and her pearls, she had looked as handsome as ever.
The truth was simply that Vetch had glanced at her without seeing her,
as he might have glanced at the gilded sheaves of wheat on a picture
frame. He had been so profoundly absorbed in his own ideas that she had
been nothing more individual than one of an audience. If he were to meet
her in the street he would probably not recognize her. And this was a
man who had never before seen a woman whose beauty had passed into
history, a man who had risen to his place through what the Judge had
described with charitable euphemism, as "unusual methods." "The odd part
about Vetch," the Judge had added meditatively on the drive home, "is
that he doesn't attempt to disguise the kind of thing that we of the old
school would call--well, to say the least--extraordinary. He is as
outspoken as Mirabeau. I can't make it out. It may be, of course, that
he has a better reading of human nature than we have, and that he knows
such gestures catch the eye, like long hair or a red necktie. It is very
much as if he said--'Yes, I'll steal if I'm driven to it, but--confound
it!--I won't lie!'"

After all, the sting to her vanity had been too slight to leave an
impression. There must be another cause for the shadow that had fallen
over her spirits. Even a reigning beauty of thirty years could scarcely
expect to be invincible; and she had known too much homage in the past
to resent what was obviously a lack of discrimination. Her
disappointment went deepe