of women. I speak therefore as an expert.
Now, just as a painter can't correctly draw the draped figure unless he has
an anatomical knowledge of the limbs beneath, so is a novelist unable to
present the character of a woman with sincerity and verisimilitude unless
he has taken into account all the hidden physiological workings of that
woman's nature. He must be familiar with the workings of the sex principle
within her, although he need not show them in his work, any more than the
painter shows the anatomy. Analyzing thus the imaginary woman, one forms a
habit of analyzing the real woman in whom one takes an interest--or rather
one does it unconsciously." He paused. "I told you it was rather delicate.
You see what I'm trying to get at? Zora Middlemist is driven round the
earth like Io by the gadfly of her temperament. She's seeking the Beauty or
Meaning or Fulfilment, or whatever she chooses to call it, of Life. What
she's really looking for is Love."

"I don't believe it," said Sypher.

Rattenden shrugged his shoulders. "It's true all the same. But in her case
it's the great love--the big thing for the big man--the gorgeous tropical
sunshine in which all the splendor of her can develop. No little man will
move her. She draws them all round her--that type has an irresistible
atmosphere--but she passes them by with her magnificent head in the air.
She is looking all the time for the big man. The pathetic comedy of it is
that she is as innocent and as unconscious of the object of her search as
the flower that opens its heart to the bee bearing the pollen on its wings.
I'm not infallible as a general rule. In this case I am."

He hastened to consume his soup which had got cold during his harangue.

"You've mixed much with women and studied them," said Sypher. "I haven't. I
was engaged to a girl once, but it was a tepid affair. She broke it off
because it was much more vital to me to work in my laboratory than to hold
her hand in her mother's parlor. No doubt she was right. This was in the
early days when I was experimenting with the Cure. Since then I've been a
man of one idea. It has absorbed all my soul and energies, so that I've had
none to spare for women. Here and there, of course--"

"I know. The trifling things. They are part of the banquet of life. One
eats and forgets."

Sypher glanced at him and nodded his appreciation of the Literary Man's
neat way of putting things. But he did not reply. He ate his fish in