Karen loathed ideas and often quoted George Moore on their hideousness. The mere suggestion of an idea was so likely to destroy the poise of her mood, that conversation became a strategy worth working for. Karen did not think, she felt--in slow, sensuous outlines. You could feel her feelings curiously putting out long streamers at you, and, if you were in the mood, a certain subterranean conversation was not impossible. But if you did not happen to guess her mood, then you quarreled. When I met Karen, she was twenty-five, and I guessed that she would always be twenty-five. She had personal ideals that she wished for herself, and if you asked what she was thinking about, it was quite likely to be the kind of noble woman she was to be, or feared she would not be, at forty. But she was too insistent upon creating her world in her own image to remain sensitive to the impressions that make for growth. As the story of her life came out, the bitter immigrant journey, the despised house-work, the struggle to get an education, the office drudgery, the lack of roots and a place, you came to appreciate this personal cult of Karen’s. She was so clearly finer and intenser than the people who had been in the world about her, that her starved soul had to find nourishment where it could. Even if she was insensible to ideas, her soft searching at least allured. It was perhaps her starved condition which made her friendships so subject to sudden disaster. Karen’s notes were always a little more brightly intimate than her personal resources were able to support. She seemed to start with a plan of the conversation in her head. If you bungled, and with her little retreats and evasions you were always bungling, you could feel her spirit stamp its feet in vexation. She would plan pleasant soliloquies, and you would find yourself in a fiercely cross-examinatory mood. She loathed your probing of her mood, and parried you in a helpless way which made you feel as if you were tearing tissue. You always seemed with Karen to be in a laboratory of personal relations where priceless things were being discovered, but you felt her more as an alchemist than a modern physicist of the soul, and her method rather that of trial and error than real experiment.