nto which a man must retire
in order to give his finer faculties free play, so no man can possibly
understand, although objective evidence may compel him to admit and
chronicle it as a fact, that a woman borne along as Rose was, upon an
irresistible tide of passions, memories and hopes, which all but made
her absent husband actually visible to her, could at the same time, be
seeing visions of her accomplished work and laying plans--limpid
practicable plans, for their realization.

This is, perhaps, one of the few, and certainly one of the most
fundamental chasms of cleavage between the two sexes; a chasm bridged by
habit invariably, because some sort of thoroughfare has to exist,
bridged, too, more rarely, by intellectual understanding. But never
bridged, I think, between two persons strongly masculine and feminine
respectively, by an instinctive sympathy. To each, the other's way of
life must always be mysterious, and at times exasperating or a little
contemptible.

To the woman, with the finely constant impenetration of love through all
her spiritual life, the man's uncontrollable blaze and his alternate
coldness, seem fitful--weak--brutish, almost unworthy of a creature with
a soul.

To the man who knows the value of his phases of high austerity and
understands quite well the price at which he obtains them, the woman who
fails to understand the necessity or to appreciate the mood seems
sentimental and a little unworthy.

Well, the fact that Rose's heart was racing and her nerves were tingling
with a newly welcomed sense of her lover's spiritual presence, did not
prevent her flying along west on Randolph Street and south again on the
west side of State, with a very clearly visualized purpose. She had
forgotten to replace her veil, but at that hour it didn't matter. The
west side of State Street, anyway, is almost as far from the east as
North Clark Street is from the Drive.

As she came abreast of the first of the big department stores which line
the west side of this thoroughfare, she saw that her surmise had been
correct. It was open. Throngs of weary shoppers were crowding out, and a
very respectable stream of them were forcing their way in. She told an
exhausted floor-walker that she wanted to buy a dressmaking form. And,
spent as he was, he reflected a little of her own animation in his
unusually precise reply; had, indeed, a little of it left over for his
next inquirer.

Something automatic in her mind t