During that first winter and the ensuing season at Newport, she had a great many proposals, but with two or three exceptions she believed them to have been more or less interested. She did not seem to “take” with men. This had angered her somewhat; she had expected to conquer the world, and she did not like obstacles. She had an odd and voluptuous beauty, she had brain and all the advantages of unique and charming surroundings, and she flattered men when she remembered that it was the thing to do. Was it because the men felt rather than knew that they did not understand her? Or was it because she did not understand them? She was keenly aware of her lack of experience, and that her knowledge of men was chiefly derived from books. And wherein she was right and wherein wrong she could not tell. She shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose experience will come with time,” she thought, “and I certainly have not much to wish for—if—only—” She clasped her hands behind her head and turned her mental eyeglass upon the unused plate at the head of the gallery. When the news of her good fortune had come, her heart’s first leap had been toward the lover who awaited her in the world thrown at her feet. That lover, that hero of her dream-world, she had not found. Occasionally she had detected a minor characteristic in some man, and by it been momentarily attracted. In no case had the characteristic been supplemented by others; and after a long and eager search she had resigned herself to the painful probability that ideals belonged to the realm of the immaterial. But, if she had sighed farewell to the faithful and much-enduring hero of her years of adversity, she had by no means relinquished the idea of loving. Few women had ever tried more determinedly and more persistently to love, and few had met with less success. She had imagined that in a world of men a woman’s only problem must be whom to choose. It had not taken her a year to discover that it is easier to scratch the earth from its molten heart than to love. She sprang to her feet and walked up and down the room with swift, impatient steps. Was she never to be happy? never to know the delights of love, the warmth of a man’s caress, the sudden, tumultuous bursting from their underground fastness of the mighty forces within her? Was she to go through life without living her romance, without knowing the sweet, keen joy of hidden love? Would she end by marrying a club-room epigram flavored with absinthe, and settle down to a light or lurid variation on Bessie’s simple little theme? She laughed aloud. Perhaps it need not be stated that a year of fashionable life had increased her contempt for matrimony.