There were times when Margarethe Styr, so long a recluse, felt embarrassed and awkward in this new and unique intimacy, little as Ordham suspected it; and there were others when she felt an almost irresistible longing to practise the arts of the enchantress and unwrap the lethargy in which her singular young friend appeared to be swaddled—fold by fold. She hated the brute in man as sullenly as ever; but personal vanity—which once had driven her to a ferocious love of power—had been starved for eight years, and, refusing to give up the ghost, sometimes muttered its rights. She imagined scenes in the gallery with the windows open to the moonlight and the warm scented vocal night, when this brilliant but lymphatic young man, under the arts of the accomplished siren, not one of which she had forgotten, would suddenly find himself the passionate determined lover. But the temptation rarely lingered, and finally passed. She indulged in no dream at any time of response, and any such violent dislocation of their present relations could only result in rupture. He would never forgive her, and she should always remember him as looking very young and ridiculous. As it was, she rarely thought of his age, and it was not long before she realized that she had in her hands the clay with which to model the one perfect experience of her life. When she discovered that her mind was revelling in this new and daily companionship, she wondered it had survived that long period of loneliness to which she had condemned it. Styr was essentially a man’s woman. If her brain accepted a mate at all, it must be a man’s. Had she made intimates among her own sex, they would quickly have been reduced to satellites or enemies.

And now, for the first time, her brain had found a mate, a fact the more wonderful and beatific because it was the one glory of which she had never dreamed even in those days when she took refuge in dreams. She determined to forge a deep and mysterious bond with the ego of this man, whom, had she been fifteen years younger and unblackened by life, she fancied she might have loved and married. She had had everything else; now she would have only the highest.

At first she could hardly formulate her wants, for the spiritual desires are very elusive, especially when the brain is fed. Indeed, the line between the mental and the spiritual desires is so fine that the spirit, the soul, is, no doubt, merely the brain raised to a higher and more intense degree both of desire and expression; it has its most comprehensible illustration in the exalted pitch it sometimes reaches under the influence of music, of Nature in the major mood, the account of some stirring and heroical deed. In other words, the soul is the brain in its best moments, when most nearly free of the flesh. It may be that these moments illuminate for a second the misty horizon which obscures the walls of death.

Fortunately there were few if any homely details to dissipate the magic halo flung around this relationship. After all, Ordham had no real rights, no authority, save such as she tacitly granted him. Her cook was a personage of variety and attainments; her household ran on wheels oiled and invisible; society, with its trivial and levelling interruptions, was away; the ugly adder of money could never rear its head between them. If ever the opportunity was granted a woman to snatch a poem out of the vast prose heap of life, it was Margarethe’s, and she had never at any time been the woman to oppose a desire that assailed her in full strength. She would have been the first to make it clear that if she had “reformed,” it was because she had outgrown the lower offerings of her nature and found the higher more interesting and satisfying.

Ordham realized sharply enough later that if he did not love her at this time it was because she pressed down the eyelids of his drowsy passions, his indolent senses; but as the weeks passed he vaguely understood that he was happy, and that only her insistent spurring made him stick to his studies and prepare for a future in which at times he quite lost interest, so perfect was the present. Styr had resisted the demoniacal teasings of her vanity, but she had no intention of denying it rights both natural and harmless; and being a woman as well versed in man as Mercator in the surfaces of Earth, she knew exactly how far to go, when to dazzle and allure him with glimpses of the hidden treasures in both their natures. To have been always merely the good comrade, sexless, the artist dwelling in regions remote from the common interests of life, would have been as fatal as to have laid down all her arms with a sigh and confessed herself the eternal woman. There were times when they quarrelled violently; and, indeed, being mistress of many moods, and not sparing in the use of them, she gave him no opportunity to tire of her and long for the wide circle in which he had hitherto fed his love of variety. She even made him accept an occasional invitation to a castle, and they took many little excursions into the country, where they read and talked and fell silent under the trees of the woods, or on the shores of some lake with a chain of Alps glittering in the distance. For the purposes of a romantic friendship Bavaria is unexcelled!

But if Ordham............