Karen interested more by what she always seemed about to say and be than by anything she was at the moment. I could never tell whether her inscrutability was deliberate or whether she did not know how to be articulate. When she was pleased she would gaze at you benignly but there was always a slight uneasiness in the air as if the serenity were only a resultant of tumultuous feelings that were struggling to appreciate the situation. She was always most animated when she was annoyed at you. At those times you could fairly feel the piquant shafts of evil-heartedness hitting your body as she contended against your egoism or any of the personal failings that hurt her sense of your fitness. These moments took you into the presence of the somber irascibility of that northern land from which she came, and you felt her foreignness brush you. Her smooth, fair, parted hair would become bristly and surly; that face, which looked in repose like some Madonna which a Swedish painter would love, took on a flush; green lights glanced from her eyes. She was as inscrutable in anger as she was in her friendliness. You never knew just what strange personal freak of your villainy had set it off, though you often found it ascribed to some boiling fury in your own placid soul. You were not aware of this fury, but her intuition for it made her more inscrutable than ever. I first met Karen at a state university in the West where she had come for some special work in literature, after a few years of earning her living at browbeaten stenography. She never went to her classes, and I had many long walks with her by the lake. In that somewhat thin intellectual atmosphere of the college, she devoted most of her time to the fine art of personal relations, and, as nobody who ever looked at her was not fascinated by her blonde inscrutability and curious soft intensity, she had no difficulty in soon enmeshing herself in several nebulous friendships. She told us that she hoped eventually to write novels, but there was never anything to show that her novels unfolded anywhere but in her mind as they interpreted the richly exciting detail of her daily personal contacts. If you asked her about her writings, you became immediately thankful that looks could not slay, and some witch-fearing ancestor crossed himself shudderingly in your soul. Intercourse with Karen was not very concrete. Our innumerable false starts at understanding, the violence and exact quality of my interest, the technique of getting just that smooth and silky rapport between us which she was always anticipating--this seemed to make up the fabric of her thoughts. At that time she was reading mostly George Moore and Henry James, and I think she hoped we would all prove adequate for a subtly interwoven society. This was a little difficult in a group that was proud of its modernities, of its dizzy walking over flimsy generalizations, of its gifts of exploding in shrapnels of epigram.