He tested his present feelings by comparing them with those he had had for Alison Fraser. He had not the least intention of setting up Audrey Craven anywhere near his idol's ancient place,--he would have shuddered at the bare idea of it. This, though he expressed it differently, was what he meant when he resolved once for all that he would never marry, never put himself in any woman's power again. And in the plenitude of his self-knowledge he knew exactly how far he could let himself go without either of these evil results following. Unfortunately, in these cases the woman is seldom so well equipped for self-defence as the man. Owing to her invincible ignorance of her own nature, she must be more or less at a disadvantage. And if this is true of women in general, it was doubly true of any one so specially prone to illusion as Audrey Craven, who would have had difficulty in recognising any part of her true self under its numerous disguises. She was therefore unaware of the action and reaction which had been going on within her during the last year. Whatever its precise quality may have been, her love for Ted Haviland was of a different quality from her feeling for Langley Wyndham. Under that earlier influence, whatever intelligence she possessed had been roused from its torpor by the tumult of her senses; her mind had been opened and made ready for the attack of a finer intellectual passion, which again in its turn brought her under the tyranny of the senses. For though her worst enemies could not call Audrey clever, it was Wyndham's intellectual eminence which had fascinated her from the first. Herein lay her danger and her excuse. She was aware--hence her late access of reserve--that she was being carried away by her feelings; but how, when, and whither, she neither knew nor apparently cared to know. In the meanwhile, in Wyndham's friendship she not only triumphed over Vincent's scorn, but she felt secure against his infatuation. For she imagined the scorn and the infatuation as still existing together. She knew that he was still in London, presumably unable to tear himself away from her neighbourhood; and the sense of his presence, of his power over her, had been so long a habit of her mind that she could not lose it now. Otherwise she hardly gave him a thought; and having cut herself off from all communication with Devon Street, she did not certainly know what had become of him. She had yet to learn.