What now formed Lee's vision had, together with no less a mystery, a greater warmth and implied reality from him. Cytherea and Mina Raff shared nothing; somehow the latter lacked the magnetism essential to the stirring of his desire. This, perhaps, was inevitable to his age, to the swift passage of that young idealism: after forty, the nebulous became a need for sensuous reality. Certain phases of Mina, as well, were utterly those of a child--she had the eluding sweetness, the flower-like indifference, of Helena, of a temperamental virginity so absolute that it was incapable of understanding or communicating an emotional fever. But, in the degree of her genius, she was above, superior to, experience; it was not, for her, necessary; she was not changed by it, but changed it into herself, into the validity of whatever she intrinsically was. His thoughts returned to the unfortunate occurrence in the library at the Groves'; his indignation at Mrs. Grove was complicated, puzzled, by the whole loss of the detached self-possession which, he had thought, was her most persistent characteristic. Her expression, in memory, specially baffled him; under other, accountable, circumstances he should have said that it was a look of suffering, of drawn pain. He couldn't recall the appearance of a shade of anger; yet the spoon had fallen as if from a hand numb with--with resentment. No other deduction was possible. He wished it were permissible to speak to her again about what--but obviously--had been no more than an accident; he objected to leaving such a ridiculous misconception of himself lodged permanently in her mind. But he couldn't bring it up again; and, after all, it mattered very little. Mrs. Grove was welcome to whatever flattering of her seductiveness her pride demanded. When he had dispatched, with Mina Raff, his duty to Claire, succeeded or failed--the latter, he added, was of course inevitable--he'd return to Eastlake and the Groves would go out of his life. The curtain of what he had thought of as a play, an interlude, would fall heavily, conclusively, and the music end. * * * * * At the St. Regis he chose the more informal dining-room with panellings and high columns of wood, and medallions in white marble. It was neither full nor empty, and they were conducted to a table set for two. Lee was conscious of heads turning, and of a faint running whisper--Mina Raff had been recognized. However, without any exhibited consciousness of this, she addressed herself to him with a pretty exclusion; and, pausing to explain her indifference to food, she left the selection of everything but the salad to Lee; she had, she admitted, a preference for alligator pears cut into small cubes with a French dressing. That disposed of, he turned to her: “I noticed, at the Plaza, that you are hard at it.”