What then? the poet, the creator, the woman, the mystic, the man skirting the fringes of death--were they kin with one another and free of some realm unknown, towards which all, consciously or unconsciously, were journeying? Where the extremes of passion (he did not mean only the passion of love), of exaltation, of danger, of courage and vision--where all these extremes met--was it there, the great crossways where the moral ended, and the divine began? Was it for Eve supremely, and to a certain extent for all women and artists--the visionaries, the lovely, the graceful, the irresponsible, the useless!--was it reserved for them to show the beginning of the road? Youth! youth and illusion! to love Eve and Aphros! when those two slipped from him he would return sobered to the path designated by the sign-posts and milestones of man, hoping no more than to keep as a gleam within him the light glowing in the sky above that unattainable but remembered city. He returned to earth; Eve was kneading and tormenting a lump of putty, and singing to herself meanwhile; he watched her delicate, able hands, took one of them, and held it up between his eyes and the sun. 'Your fingers are transparent, they're like cornelian against the light,' he said. She left her hand within his grasp, and smiled down at him. 'How you play with me, Julian,' she said idly. 'You're such a delicious toy.' 'Only a toy?' He remembered the intricate, untranslatable thoughts he had been thinking about her five minutes earlier, and began to laugh to himself. 'A great deal more than a toy. Once I thought of you only as a child, a helpless, irritating, adorable child, always looking for trouble, and turning to me for help when the trouble came.' 'And then?' 'Then you made me think of you as a woman,' he replied gravely. 'You seemed to hesitate a good deal before deciding to think of me as that.' 'Yes, I tried to judge our position by ordinary codes; you must have thought me ridiculous.' 'I did, darling.' Her mouth twisted drolly as she said it. 'I wonder now how I could have insulted you by applying them to you,' he said with real wonderment; everything seemed so clear and obvious to him now. 'Why, how do you think of me now?' 'Oh, God knows!' he replied. 'I've called you changeling sometimes, haven't I?' He decided to question her. 'Tell me, Eve, how do you explain your difference? you outrage every accepted code, you see, and yet one retains one's belief in you. Is one simply deluded by your charm? or is there a deeper truth? can you explain?' He had spoken in a bantering tone, but he knew that he was trying an experiment of great import to him. 'I don't think I'm different, Julian; I think I feel things strongly, no more.' 'Or else you don't feel them at all.' 'What do you mean?' 'Well--Paul,' he said reluctantly. 'You have never got over that, have you?'