him. It was a new sensation, pleasurable, like floating down a stream with
the water murmuring in her ears. Then, suddenly, as if startled to vivid
consciousness out of a dream, she awakened, furiously indignant.

"Why shouldn't I go? Tell me once and for all, why?"

She expected what any woman alive might have expected save the chosen few
who have the great gift of reading the souls of the poet and the visionary;
and Clem Sypher, in his way, was both. She braced her nerves to hear the
expected. But the poet and the visionary spoke.

It was the old story of the Cure, his divine mission to spread the healing
unguent over the suffering earth. Voices had come to him as they had come
to the girl at Domrémy, and they had told him that through Zora Middlemist,
and no other, was his life's mission to be accomplished.

To her it was anticlimax. Reaction forced a laugh against her will. She
leaned back among the sofa cushions.

"Is that all?" she said, and Sypher did not catch the significance of the
words. "You seem to forget that the rôle of Mascotte is not a particularly
active one. It's all very well for you, but I have to sit at home and twirl
my thumbs. Have you ever tried that by way of soul-satisfying occupation?
Don't you think you're just a bit--egotistical?"

He relaxed the tension of his attitude with a sigh, thrust his hands into
his pockets and sat down.

"I suppose I am. When a man wants something with all the strength of his
being and thinks of nothing else day or night, he develops a colossal