experience with women, he could recall no woman with a comparable
development of this curious quality of multiple personalities, showing
and vanishing in swift succession.

There had been a time when woman had interested him as a puzzle to be
worked out, a maze to be explored, a temple to be penetrated--until one
reached the place where the priests manipulated the machinery for the
wonders and miracles to fool the devotees into awe. Some men never get
to this stage, never realize that their own passions, working upon the
universal human love of the mysterious, are wholly responsible for the
cult of woman the sphynx and the sibyl. But Norman, beloved of women,
had been let by them into their ultimate secret--the simple humanness of
woman; the clap-trappery of the oracles, miracles, and wonders. He had
discovered that her "divine intuitions" were mere shrewd guesses, where
they had any meaning at all; that her eloquent silences were screens for
ignorance or boredom--and so on through the list of legends that prop
the feminist cult.

But this girl--this Miss Hallowell--here was a tangible mystery--a
mystery of physics, of chemistry. He sat watching her--watching the
changes as she bent to her work, or relaxed, or puzzled over the meaning
of one of her own hesitating stenographic hieroglyphics--watched her as
the waning light of the afternoon varied its intensity upon her skin.
Why, her very hair partook of this magical quality and altered its tint,
its degree of vitality even, in harmony with the other changes. . . . What
was the explanation? By means of what rare mechanism did her nerve force
ebb and flow from moment to moment, bringing about these fascinating
surface changes in her body? Could anything, even any skin, be better
made than that superb skin of hers--that master work of delicacy and
strength, of smoothness and color? How had it been possible for him to