truth was that they troubled him; and within three blocks he had
turned. The second view intensified rather than lessened his feeling,
and he walked quickly into the shop odorous with burned sugar. The doll
was removed from the window--it had come from Paris, he learned--and,
after a single covert glance, he bought it, for, he needlessly informed
the girl wrapping it in an unwieldy light package, his daughter.

To his secret satisfaction, Helena, who was twelve, hadn't been
strongly prepossessed; and the doll--though Lee Randon no longer
thought of it as merely that--left downstairs, had been finally placed
on the white over-mantel of the fireplace by the dining-room door.

There, when he was alone, he very often stopped to gaze at the figure;
and, during such a moment of speculative abstraction, he had, from the
memories of early reading, called her Cytherea. That, Lee remembered
vaguely, was the Cytheranian name of the mysterious goddess of love,
Venus, of the principle, the passion, of life stirring in plants and
men. But in the shape above him it had been strangely modified from an
apparently original purpose, made infinitely difficult if not
impossible of understanding. His Cytherea bore the traces, the results,
of old and lost and polished civilizations; there was about her even a
breath of immemorial China. It mingled with a suggestion of Venice, the
eighteenth century Venice of the princes of Naxos--how curiously she
brought back tags of discarded reading!--and of the rococo Viennese
court. This much he grasped; but the secret of her fascination, of
what, at heart, she represented, what in her had happened to love,
entirely escaped him.

Lee was interested in this, he reassured his normal intelligence,
because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life