"Yes, something. Except that perhaps our women are more sentimental, not
fond of intrigue for its own sake--at least, not as a rule."

"Doesn't interest them deeply enough, I suppose. It's the American blood
coming out--the passion for achievement. They want a man of whom they can
be proud, a man who is doing something interesting and doing it well."

"I doubt that," replied Segur shrugging his shoulders. "When a woman loves
a man, she wants to absorb him."

Howard soon went away to his rooms for a long evening of undisturbed
thought about Teddy Danvers's fiancee--the first temptation that had
entered his loneliness since Alice died.

In the few weeks of her illness and the few months immediately following
her death, he had been at his very best. He was able to see her as she was
and to appreciate her. He was living in the clear pure air of the Valley of
the Great Shadow where all things appear in their true relations and true
proportions. But only there was it possible for the gap between him and
Alice to close--that gap of which she was more acutely conscious than he,
and which she made wider far than it really was by being too humble with
him, too obviously on her knees before him. Such superiority as she thought
he possessed is not in human nature; but neither is it in human nature to
refuse worship, to refuse to pose upon a pedestal if the opportunity
presses.

In the three years between her death and his meeting Marian, the eternal
masculine had been secretly gaining strength to resume its pursuit of the
eternal feminine. And the eternal feminine was certainly most alluringly