This office was a gathering place for several young writers, each of whom fondled his pet rebellion against conservative standards, and they clustered around the anxiously seraphic face of Martha Apperson, the young editor, and seriously fought for the treason of her smiles. She was a tall, sturdily slender woman with a blithely symmetrical swerve to her body, and the natural pinkness of her face parted into the curves of a lightly distressed and virginal doll. Her blue-gray eyes were looking at life with a startled incredulity--the gaze of one who has been tempted to regard a sometimes merry, but more often vaguely sorrowful picture-puzzle. Life to her was a rapidly taunting mixture of glints, hints, undertones, surface blooms, fleeting tints, portentous shadows with little shape to them, broken images, and misty heights, and she was forever trying to lure them all into a cohesive whole by striding from one philosophy and creed to another, adding another stride every three or four months. At such times she would appear at her office and enthusiastically assure her audience that she had finally accomplished the almost obscene miracle of penetrating the depths of human existence. She had started her magazine as a strident protest against “the people who live conventionally, steeped in a vicious comfort that binds their imaginations and ruins their legs and arms,” and its pages made an awkwardly weird combination of sophomoric revolts, longings for “beauty and splendor”--those easily bought thrones for the importance of youth--and enraged yelps against traditions and conventions, with here and there a more satirically detached note from Carl and two other men. Carl knew that he wanted her body because it was the only mystery that she seemed to possess and because he wondered whether it might not be able to make her thoughts less obvious. Her mind was a stumbling jest to him and her jerkily volatile pretences of emotion failed to cleave him.