About two o'clock Jenny woke up to another psychic experience not unusual with hypersensitive temperaments. The ardor of the farewell embrace had consumed all the difficulties of the situation discussed on the journey home. This ardor of merely sensuous love had lasted long enough to carry her off to sleep drowsed by a passionate content. Meanwhile her brain, working on what was originally the more vital emotion, brought her back to consciousness in the middle of the problem's statement. Lying there in the darkness, Jenny blushed hotly, so instant was the mental attitude produced by Maurice's demand. In previous encounters over this subject, her protagonists had all been so manifestly contemptible, their expectations so evident from the beginning, that their impudence had been extinguished by the fire of merely social indignation. Jenny had defeated them as the representative of her sex rather than herself. She had never comprehended the application of their desires to herself as a feasible proposition. They were a fact merely objectively unpleasant like monkeys in a cage, physically dangerous, however, with certain opportunities Jenny's worldly wisdom would never afford. In the case of Maurice the encounter was actual, involving a clash of personalities: the course of her behavior would have to be settled. No longer fortified by the hostility of massed opinion, she would be compelled to entrust her decision to personal resolution and individual judgment. For the first time she was confronted with the great paradox that simultaneously restricts and extends a woman's life. She remembered the effect of Edie's announcement of surrender. It had sickened her with virginal wrath and impressed her with a sense of man's malignity, and now here was she at the cross-roads of experience with sign-posts unmistakable to dominate her mental vision.