Joan was talking for Doctor Steiner in these musings. She had almost forgotten the presence of the occasion of them, and Doctor Steiner’s emaciated face with its piercing but impersonal eyes was before her, in her imagination, more vivid to her than Hugh in the flesh. He was probing with herself into the depths of her psyche, watching with a whole mind’s powerful concentration for the one word that might turn the lock, explain to them Joan’s inability to live life as the majority of people do live it, discover the mystery of why she, almost alone in the world of civilized women, felt that if she could not give herself in her entirety to a marriage she could not give herself at all: in other words, that compromise was beneath her. Doctor Steiner had often drawn her attention to the fact that compromise is the attitude necessary if one is to lead a normal, rational life. The gods, if there are gods, may live without it, but not mortals. Joan must forget her Luciferian pride, learn to be an ordinary mortal, if she hoped for happiness. Last night she had dreamed, and written it down with minutest detail in her dream notebook kept for Doctor Steiner’s eyes alone, something which might help him to understand, more than any other dream she’d had since being analyzed, the secret of this inability to stoop to compromise with life. It was a dream which, given almost any interpretation, flattered Joan’s soul very much. She could hardly wait for Doctor Steiner to hear it and by its illumination pierce a little deeper with his so divinely impersonal vision into her mysterious depths. Indeed, she found herself looking forward to to-morrow afternoon, and the two hours he would give her in his office then, with a vast impatience. Would that it were here! After all, what could Laura Hunt-Smith’s house party offer in competition with two hours of Doctor Steiner’s active interest in one’s complicated soul states! But Doctor Steiner’s keen face was beginning to disintegrate and form again into Hugh’s obtuse one. Hugh had completed his trench and was interrupting Joan’s train of absorbing thoughts by talking. And about Brenda Loring! Stupid of him! Joan was tired of Brenda. She herself had exhausted that subject, and here was Hugh keeping it up. He was saying, “There’s no question of sentimentality between us. Brenda and I are friends. And she has no more designs on me than I have on her. That’s one of the things I like about her. She’s so finely independent.” “Perhaps not so independent as you think! She’s only human, dear boy, even if she does make fifty thousand or so a year out of that way she has with interiors. But I’m not pretending to understand Brenda. It’s only you I know so well. And I do think it may be rather a pity that you can’t bring yourself to be fonder of her.”