“ Helen gazed at her with an expression of sheer horrified amazement that delighted her. "How can as sweet and pure a woman as you talk that way?"
Courtney laughed gayly. "Because she's neither sweet nor pure. Because she's got intelligence and experience. I just wanted to show you that while you were pretending to think about love—ideal, romantic, unselfish love, you were really planning for food, clothing and shelter."
"But I don't want to hear such talk!" cried Helen. "If I'm deluded, why, let me stay so. You are so frivolous, Courtney! Don't you believe in love at all?" ”

“ Even where a woman cannot doubt that her lover has forgotten, there are times when memory—of his vows so convincing, of his caresses that seemed the inspiration of her charms alone—makes her defy certainty and believe. And Courtney had no real reason to think him either false or forgetful. They had been torn apart when their love was still hungry and thirsty, when even the long calm that precedes satiety was still far in the future, when they were so absorbed in loving that they had not yet had time to begin to get acquainted with each other's real self. ”

“ Angry though an untruth about anyone or anything we love makes us, that anger is as equanimity itself beside the anger roused by a disagreeable truth.
As they neared the house she quickened her pace, hurrying not so much from Richard as from her own thoughts—the thoughts his words had startled from unexpected lurking places as a sudden light sets bats to whirling. Courtney was loyal through and through; also, she clung to Basil like a shipwrecked sailor to a life raft. The stronger the waves of adverse destiny or of doubt, the fiercer she clung to her life raft. ”

“ She felt guilty; would not the right sort of woman have been able to meet such talk from a man, even a Shirley Drummond, with effective fiery resentment? But she knew it was not her guilt that she was weeping for. No, her tears were flowing from the wounds in her heart—the wounds she had thought healed. She had not the faintest feeling in the least akin to love for Shirley Drummond. She never could love him. She had always avoided him as far as her instinct against hurting people's feelings permitted. His grotesque proposal, in itself, appealed only to her sense of humor. ”

“ She wrenched herself free, put her arm over her eyes as if she could thus hide from herself the sight of his soul which in drunken abandon he had completely unmasked.
"Don't be frightened," he maundered on. "I'm a man of honor—'honor rooted in dishonor' as Tennyson says. I'll not go. I'll submit to it—all right. Love gives a man a stomach for anything."
She wished to fly, but her legs would not carry her. She had to stay—and listen.
"How I've been dragged down! How a woman can drag a man down! Not Helen—no—she's an angel. But those good women never are as fascinating as you others.... Love?" ”

“ In the soil it is born; by the soil it chiefly lives. Courtney's fancy was the fancy of a normal human being in whom all the emotions are healthy, ardent, fully developed. It had no long or difficult task in blurring into vagueness whatever marred her memory of her and Basil's romance—or at least in making the blemishes for the time seem unimportant in presence of the rosy, horizon-filling peak moments of their happiness. Once more, from the quiet of her long lonely evenings—hardly the less solitary for Helen's rather monotonous company—arose the longings, the visions, the thrills. ”

“ But Courtney did not overestimate her triumph. Often day completely reverses the night view of things. But now, in the fancy-dispelling day more clearly than in the fancy-breeding night, she saw she must remove the temptation. If she had been a small or a stupid woman—or both, for the two qualities usually go together—she would have laid all the blame upon Helen and would have sent her away—and in vanity as to her power over him would have imagined herself once more perfectly secure. But the impulse to blame Helen and to get rid of her did not survive the second thought. ”

“ The mists of his abstraction had completely hid his personality from her, as from everybody. Those mists had blown away in the cyclone of the disruption of their marriage, and he had stood revealed—and Basil also—Basil, the dwarf beside the giant. She could see how the lesser man had made what was, in the circumstances, irresistible appeal to the imperious craving that must be satisfied before the need of heart for sympathy and of mind for comradeship could gain a hearing, the craving that in gaining its ends will compel the imagination to play any necessary sorry trick upon the intelligence. ”

“ His knowledge was like a rapier of finest steel skilfully used in his duel with his mysterious masked combatant, the alchemist on guard at nature's secretest laboratory. She felt that he was a man out of a million; yet she had no sense of embarrassed inferiority. This general in the army of exact science, which is the true army of progress, was a democrat, marched with the soldiers afoot, was their equal. "If any woman ever does fall in love with him," thought she, "she will worship him. But—he's too impersonal. We women want something smaller—not a sun star, but a fire on a hearth." ”

“ There is in every one of us a chamber where vanity and hope live and ever conspire to deceive, and if possible, destroy us. From that secret chamber she now wrenched an amazing secret. She discovered that from the beginning—yes, from the beginning—she, determined to satisfy the craving of elemental flesh and blood, had been lying to herself about Basil Gallatin. Passion had taken sly advantage of her loneliness and her longing for sympathy and companionship; it had beguiled her imagination into creating out of the very ordinary materials of his true personality the lover she had been adoring. ”

“ I shall grow hardened——"
"Oh, but you must not, Basil!" she cried in dismay. "We must not. That's our danger, and we must fight it.... Isn't it pitiful! If we were two coarse people, mere animals, merely the ordinary man and woman, why, we'd be happy and never give remorse a thought."
"If we suffer more, we enjoy more," said he, clasping her as if some power had tried to snatch her away. "When I feel ashamed, Courtney, all I have to do is to remember your hair, to feel again its soft splendor on my face, between my fingers—and I am delirious." ”

“ And when Helen, going to Saint X to visit and display her finery, returned in a self-complacent state of mind that indicated a complete cure, a complete restoration of her old-time content, Courtney felt as if the last cloud had disappeared from her horizon. Again and again during those tranquil, sparkling days she told herself—and almost believed—that at last her life was "settled right"—as nearly "right" as a human life could be.
One night when she had an appointment with Basil she found Helen still up as she was about to descend and admit him. ”

“ And now, just as she was getting over her deep-down shyness with him, was feeling the beginnings of the courage to be wholly her natural self, to show him her inmost thoughts, o release the tenderness, the demonstrativeness that had been pent up in her all her life—just as the climax of happiness was at hand—here was this shadow, this relegating her to the chill isolation and self-suppression and self-concealment of a pedestaled Vaughan wife. "He acts as if a woman were not like a man—as if I had no sense because I'm not tall, and don't go about in a frown and spectacles." ”

“ She met his gaze steadily. His eyes shifted. "Not at all," he repeated. He was still talking as if to a stranger. She understood why; it would have been impossible for any force, even such a discovery as this, to galvanize into a living personality, with a mind to think and to will, the woman who had for six years been mere incident in his busy life, "Not at all like you," he again repeated. "Yet—why did I feel it was true as soon as Nanny told me?"
She remained silent and motionless.
"Why don't you speak?" he demanded, trying to rouse himself to reality. "Why don't you defend yourself?" ”

“ When she reached the dining room her husband and Basil and Winchie were already at the supper table. As they rose, Basil did not lift his eyes; her husband gave her a glance of greeting. But Richard, the married man of five years, did not really see her face as it then was, but the face that had long been fixed in his mind as hers. To have seen her as she was, he would have had to be startled out of matrimonial myopia by some shock. There was no arresting change flaunted in Courtney's features; youth has no wrinkles and hollows in which the shadows of emotion can gather thick and linger. ”

“ And in the lulls, with passion exhausted and needing the stimulus of contrast—he sometimes fancied that, if he could somehow contrive to assert his manhood and escape from slavery to Courtney, he would be happy with Helen, and once more noble and good. Like many another, he flattered himself that he had an aspiration to a better life when in reality he was making pretense of virtuous longing merely to whet his appetite for vice. He shut his eyes to the obvious but rarely seen—or, rather, rarely admitted—truth that a man is as he does, not as he pretends or dreams. ”

“ When Winchie went up, Courtney accompanied him. Toward ten she left the book she had been pretending to read and sat in the hammock on the balcony. The moon, huge and ruddy through an opening among the boughs, poured its flood of elfin light over lake and lawns and gardens. The soft shadows, the vague vistas, the overpowering perfume of honeysuckle and jasmine and rose combined to beguile her out of all sense of reality. "I've been dreaming—dreaming," she murmured. And what an incredible dream! No man—least of all Richard, the prejudiced, the domineering—would have acted so in real life. ”

“ She felt him trembling, and there was a sob in his voice as he answered: "But when your arms ache with emptiness, you can put them round Winchie. While I—Courtney, how can I touch another woman, when it's you—you—you—" And his groping hand met hers, clasped it. He bent his head, kissed her hand—the back, the palm, then the fingers one by one. And they softly touched his cheek. "Basil!" she sighed.
The faint wind agitated the clusters of locust blooms; their perfume descended in heavy voluptuous waves. He pressed his hands one against each of her cheeks. "Courtney," he murmured. ”

“ In face of the clearest proof from without against Basil, she would have shut her eyes and held fast to him. Yet with devilish malice and merciless persistence circumstances were now constantly taking her blind resolute loyalty by surprise and forcing upon her exhibitions of him as a shallow and sensual person. A proud, intelligent woman's love could reconcile itself to either of these—to a shallow man whose passion was simply symbol of deep and sincere love; or, to a sensual man whose grossness was the coarse rich soil that sent up and nourished high intelligence, fascinating and compelling. ”

“ She was glad it was still woman's chief asset in the struggle for existence; for, she could not help knowing she had beauty, and it is beauty that makes virtue valuable, though of course beauty adds nothing to its glory.
Helen certainly had beauty, nearly as great beauty as she imagined in that heart of hearts where our vanity feels free to spread its tail to the last gaudy feather and to strut as no peacock or gobbler ever dared. Her skin was white as milk, her features were classically regular, and she was now a shade taller than Basil, could almost look level-eyed at Richard. ”

“ The city's egotism is showy, but shallow; the country's, hidden but profound.
Viewed from Chicago, all the beauty, all the possibilities of happiness in her life in that lovely place on the shore of Wenona Lake stood out as in the landscape of a master painter; and all that fretted and shamed her and shot her joys with black thread of foreboding seemed the work of her own tainted imagination. "I'm harming no one," she now argued. "I'm free—Richard freed me when he made me realize I was to him not a wife but simply a carnal incident. And I am helping to make life there peaceful and even happy. ”

“ Courtney, her back to Helen, was busy with the morning-glories. "Of course," said she. "One may eat because one is fond of the dinner—of the dishes, of the way it's served, of the company, and so on, and so on. But what's the real reason?" She turned on Helen with a mocking smile. "Why, because to live one must eat. That makes the rest incidental. A sensible person tries to take the most favorable view of the food he has to eat or go without. A sensible woman does her best to love the man that asks her." ”

“ She had always classed herself with the flyabout sort of women rather than with the domestic sort; she had fallen into the common error of taking as representative of the domestic type those dreary rotters who sit at home inert and slovenly simply because it requires less effort to stay at home than to dress and issue forth. Now she saw that she was domestic, was a home-maker and a home-lover; and she understood a deeper depth of her unhappiness—the unhappiness that comes from being cheated out of one's dearest desires; for how incomplete must be any home without love of husband and wife. ”