"'But,' I said, 'if you could get a girl like Miss Macedoine.' Mrs. Evans kept her gaze on Babs, who was staring at me over the rim of the cup with her bold, protuberant black eyes like those of some marine animal. "'No,' she said, 'girls like that are too much trouble.' "'You mean--followers?' I suggested. Mrs. Evans turned red and moved slightly. "'She wasn't nice,' she replied, coldly, and pronounced it 'neyce.' "'Oh,' I said, 'I wasn't aware you knew.' She got redder. "'I don't know what you are talking about,' she muttered. 'As far as I could see, she was very fortunate in getting her passage out free, very fortunate. She was not neyce with Babs. Babs didn't take to her. Children _know_!' "'Still,' I said, looking at the omniscient Babs lying back in repletion and trying to decide upon some fresh demand, 'Still, I felt sorry for her, a pretty creature like that, at a dangerous age, you know...' I had to stop, for Mrs. Evans' usually pale features were a dull brick red. Her head was drawn back and she became rigid with disapproval. This is what I mean when I say such women wield enormous power. They are panoplied in prejudice and conventional purity. Mrs. Evans was like that. She was safe. She was a pure woman. I looked at her thin, peaked little features as she replaced the blanket about the kicking limbs of the angel child and thought of that girl with her bright, defiant, derisive smile challenging me to high adventure. Mrs. Evans' function in life was not to challenge but to disapprove. She could endure no discussion of the fundamentals. She could read tales of passion and rape, and not a flicker of emotion would cross that pallid face. But there must be no spoken word. Instinctively she drew back and became rigid, protecting her immaculate soul and the angel child from the faintest breath of reality. In that flat bosom raged a hatred, a horror, of beauty and the desire of it--a conviction that it was neither good nor evil, but simply strange, foreign, unknown, unsuitable; incompatible with the semi-detached house on the Portsmouth Road whose photograph hung on the bulkhead behind her. There was something shocking in the contrast this woman presented to her environment out there. Grünbaum, living under the shadow of his mountain, claiming from the world 'confidence in his dispositions'; Macedoine and his lieutenant devising fantastic skin-games to be played out among the haunts of the old Cabirian gods; Artemisia fighting her own sad little battle with the fates and steeling her soul with reckless resolutions; even old Jack, no bad prototype of the ancient ship-masters who ran their battered biremes up on yonder beach to mend their storm-strained gear--all were more or less congruous with this old Isle of Ipsilon, where Perseus grew to manhood and from whose shores he set out on his journey to find Medusa. But not she. She transcended experience. To know her made one incredulous of one's own spiritual adventures.