My thoughts stood apart from the city, and from myself, and from each other. I knew that I had come to a crisis in my years. I needed Mildred and I needed my work. To forego my impecunious glory upon the laboratory battlefield meant death. To fail of Mildred seemed to mean death, also. How could I have them both? I had not even wooed her. Her brilliant being stood beyond any touch or any claim of mine. Had she been a woman whom I could bind with sentimental promise or engage with the zest of fighting with me toward a dim future, she had not been Mildred. She was alive, gloriously, luminously alive. Like a flame she spent herself in the day, and she might be gone to-morrow. Even now, I could not tell but there was possibly another’s love to fuel her. But even if she could wait, could I? I knew at last the desperate price of my abstaining years. There was stored up in me a might of energy, continent, compressed, and the fire touched it. I was fire--a white totality of active hunger, kindling, devouring in a moment the years’ accumulated burden. I needed Mildred; and needed her perfectly; and needed her at once. I could not take her hidden, meanly, without killing my great need ere its fulfillment. All the ways of an inherited culture had this night for me their reason. Beauty and amenity of place, the lovely stuffs wealth has created for its homes and bodies ... I saw them all as acolytes of my essential worship. Mildred stood helpless like a goddess: no man dared take her without the fullest raiment and the richest music, and a fair temple built to flesh her spirit. Such were the exalted symbols of my sense, but my thoughts were shrewd. This perfect child was of the modern world. To snatch her away would be to blemish her. What the world could bring to make an harmonious matrix for her life with me, in no way changing her, was the instant need. Marriage ... a home. All else had been violence rather than fruition: a gesture like that of a crazed man who mars his love in the impotence of desire. But what hope was there? Why as I walked through the high Spring-flushed night did I not walk in despair? My mother was the implacable foe of Mildred and in her hand was a weapon she had already with sure instinct wielded. And Mildred herself: what reason had I to believe that she would love me, wed me ... even if the way were clear? We were friends. I had soon won from her the clear note of her laughter. But her laughter surely was no hidden grace that I alone could win.