Yetta walked home through the dawn. She was very tired, and she tried not to think. But she could not free herself from the insistent question--"Did I really kiss him?" She looked at herself in the glass, just before she turned out the gas and went to bed. "Did I really kiss him?" she asked her reflected image. She got no answer, and, as though vexed at this silence, she spoke defiantly. "If I did, I'm sorry. I don't love him." This rather comforted her, and she fell asleep at once. But when she woke up in the early afternoon, she felt worse about the night's adventure than ever. Very emphatically she told herself that she loved Walter. That had been _La grande passion_. No. Not "had been"; it "was." It was a treason to think of it as "having been." She had told Walter that love had no tenses, that it was "somehow eternally always and now and for ever and ever." Romance still dominated all her thinking. The books and poems said there could only be one real love. She was sure that her love for Walter had been real--hence, in strict logic, she loved him still and always would and could never love any one else. Although she really believed this--wanted to believe it, felt that life would be impossible on any other hypothesis--she was beginning to realize that somehow the Romantic Explanation of Life does not quite explain. For the poets it was beautifully simple--either you loved or you did not love. It was the crudest sort of dualism. Things were black or white. The gray tones were not mentioned. But while she did not love Isadore as she had loved Walter, he was certainly in a different category from all the other men whom she did not love. The men at the office, for instance. She was the best of chums with them; she respected them, admired them, liked them--and did not love them. But it was different with Isadore. The hungry look in his eyes haunted her. The memory of his sudden, unexpected ardor--the rough vehemence of his caresses, his stormy outbreak of passionate tenderness--disturbed and distressed her. She had never taken him quite seriously before. She had deliberately, but unconsciously, refused to look the matter in the face. It is very hard to be sympathetic and just to a love we do not return. It had not occurred to her that Isadore's love was as painful to him as hers for Walter had been. That startling contact in the dark of the office had opened her eyes to the reality of his passion. What a mess it all was! Isadore loved her. She loved Walter. Walter loved Mabel!