All at once she was seized with a terrible sense of absurdity and incongruity. Was it possible, was it even remotely conceivable that he should love her? She did not know that she was on the brink of the perennial mystery that has surprised millions of men and women: she felt that her question was singularly acute and penetrating. What was there in her that could attract him? Not her intellect, for he knew full well the measure of that. Not her musical genius, for he was not an admirer of it. Not her sympathies and ideals common to his, for she was incapable of understanding the major part of him. Nor even her beauty, for she was not beautiful. What, then, could it be? And the answer was that love, the force he despised, the elemental thing to which he conceived himself superior, had linked him to her by bonds that he had not the power to sever. The strong man had toppled. He suddenly ceased to be a god in the clouds and became a human being on her earth. Would his ideals crumble to dust at the touch of this mighty enslaving force? Would he shatter the dreams of a lifetime, those mighty dreams of his that had nothing to do with love, would he shatter them and lay the ruins at her feet? How would he reconcile the iron rigidity of his theories with the impulse of his passion? There had been a time when she thought: All I want is his friendship, his sympathy, his understanding, the consciousness that our souls are affinite. Intellectual and spiritual sympathy with him, she had argued, is the summit of my ambition. To talk with him on terms of candid intimacy, to be the sharer of his deepest confidences, to realize in their relationship something of the glorious male ideal of camaraderie, that had been her grand aim. She had deceived herself. That was not so. In the moment that he stood on the foot-board of the departing train at Cambridge every vestige of the platonic camouflage was torn from her. There was one thought that was infinitely more rapturous, infinitely more seductive and alluring, than even the thought that he and she were on terms of deep intellectual and spiritual intimacy. And that was the thought that whilst he was standing there on the foot-board he was wondering whether to kiss her. If now her platonic dreams were to be fulfilled, she would be strangely and subtly disappointed. Deep communion with a god-like personality was fine. But she preferred the impulse that changed the deity into a man, that dragged him from the stars into the streets, that caused all his dreams and ideals to be obscured by that single momentous triviality, the desire to kiss her.