It is not to be supposed that Hermia’s imagination was faithful to the Orient. Her nature had great sensuous breadth and wells of passion which penetrated far down into the deep, hard substratum of New England rock; but her dreams were apt to be inspired by what she had read last. She loved the barbarous, sensuous, Oriental past, but she equally loved the lore which told of the rugged strength and brutal sincerity of mediæval days, when man turned his thoughts to love and war and naught besides; when the strongest won the woman he wanted by murder and force, and the woman loved him the better for doing it. Hermia would have gloried in the breathless uncertainty of those days, when death and love went hand-in-hand, and every kiss was bought with the swing of a battle-axe. She would have liked to be locked in her tower by her feudal father, and to have thrown down a rope-ladder to her lover at night. Other periods of history at times demanded her, and she had a great many famous lovers: Bolingbroke and Mirabeau, Napoleon and Aaron Burr, Skobeleff and Cavour, a motley throng who bore a strong racial resemblance to one another when roasting in the furnace of her super-heated imagination. Again, there were times when love played but a small part in her visions. She was one of the queens of that world to which she had been born, a world whose mountains were of cold brown stone, and in whose few and narrow currents drifted stately maidens in stiff, white collars and tailor-made gowns. She should be one of that select band. It was her birthright; and each instinct of power and fastidiousness, caste and exclusiveness, flourished as greenly within her as if those currents had swept their roots during every year of her life’s twenty-four. When ambition sank down, gasping for breath, love would come forward eager and warm, a halo enveloped the brown-stone front, and through the plate-glass and silken curtains shone the sun of paradise. For a few weeks the charm of solitude retained its edge. Then, gradually, the restlessness of Hermia’s nature awoke after its sleep and clamored for recognition. She grew to hate the monotony of her own society as she had that of her little circle. She came to dread the silence of the house; it seemed to close down upon her, oppressing, stifling, until she would put her hand to her throat and gasp for breath. Sometimes she would scream at every noise; her nerves became so unstrung that sleep was a visitor who rarely remembered her. Once, thinking she needed change of scene, she went to Jersey. She returned the next morning. The interruption of the habit of years, the absolute change of the past few months made it impossible to take up again the strings of her old life. They had snapped forever, and the tension had been too tight to permit a knot. She could go down to the river, but not back to the existence of the past thirteen years.