Still John had no reproaches for the actress. Instead, he found within him a renascence of respect for her, particularly for her frankness. Most women—most men, too, for that matter, he thought—play the hypocrite with themselves and with others. He must do her full credit. She had not done so. She might have ruined him. He owed his escape to no discernment of his own. When he had not understood, she had resolutely played the scene out for him—to the uttermost. It must have cost a woman, any woman, something to do that, he reasoned. Under this interpretation, Marien was no longer repulsive to him. Instead, he found in her something to admire. Her courage was sublime. Her devotion to her god, ambition, if terrible, was also magnificent. "Yet, why," he asked himself, "did she let me take her in my arms? Sympathy," he answered at last. "She never loved me. A woman who loved a man could not do what she did in the restaurant. She was very sorry for me, that was all. She let me kiss her as she would let a dog lick her hand." And then he remembered another speech of hers: "If a man is sometimes man, may not woman be also sometimes woman?" This helped him finally and completely, as he thought, to understand; but it left him with a still deeper sense of his own weakness and humiliation. Marien Dounay had roused the woman want in him and while she was near, her personality had been strong enough to center that want upon herself. But when she shook his passion free of her, it turned, after circling like a homing pigeon, due upon its course to Bessie. John saw that this was all logical and psychological. Patently, it was also biological. But it was mortifying beyond words. He felt that he had dishonored himself and dishonored Bessie. He had supposed himself strong; he found himself weak. He had been swept off his feet and out of his head. He was ashamed of himself, heartily. Bessie, the good, the pure, the noble! Why, he could not think of her at all in the terms in which he thought of Marien Dounay. His instinct for Marien had been to possess. For Bessie it was to revere, to worship—and yet—and yet—he wanted her now with an urge that was stronger than ever he had felt for Marien. Still, he had no impulse to rush to Bessie. He felt unworthy. He could not see himself taking her hand, touching her lips, declaring his love to her now. It seemed to him that he must test his love for Bessie before he declared it, and purify it by months—years, perhaps,—of waiting, as if to expiate the sin of his weakness. But in the meantime, Bessie loved him, and would be loving him all the time. And he could write to her! Ah, what letters he would write, letters that would not only keep her love alive but fan it, while he punished himself for his insane disloyalty.