I am quite sure that Karen’s system of personal relations was platonic. She never seemed to get beyond that laying of the broad foundation of the Jamesian tone that would have been necessary to make the thing an “affair.” She was often lovely and she was not unloved. She was much interested in men, but it was more as co-actors in a personal drama of her own devising than as lovers or even as men. The most she ever hoped for, I think, was to be the sacred fount, and to have her flow copious and manifold. You felt the immense qualifications a man would have to have in the subtleties of rapport to make him even a candidate for loving. For Karen, men seemed to exist only as they brought a touch of ceremonial into their personal relations. I think Karen never quite intended to surround herself with the impenetrable armor of vestal virginity, and yet she did not avoid it. However glowing and mysterious she might look as she lay before the fire in her room, so that to an impatient friend nothing might seem more important than to catch her up warmly in his arms, he would have been an audacious brigand who violated the atmosphere. Karen always so much gave the impression of playing for higher and nobler stakes that no brigand ever appeared. Whether she deluded herself as to what she wanted or whether she had a clearer insight than most women into the predatoriness of my sex, her relations with men were rarely smooth. Caddishness seemed to be breaking out repeatedly in the most unexpected places. Some of the most serious of my friends got dark inadequacies charged against them by Karen. I was a little in her confidence, but I could rarely gather more than that the men of to-day had no sensitiveness and were far too coarse for the fine and decent friendships which she spent so much of her time and artistic imagination on arranging for them with herself. I was constantly undergoing, at the hands of Karen, a course of discipline myself, for my ungovernable temper or my various repellant “tones” or my failure to catch just the quality of certain people we discussed. I understood dimly the lucklessness of her “cads.” They had perhaps not been urbanely plastic, they had perhaps been impatiently adoring. They had at least not offended in any of the usual ways. She would even forgive them sometimes with surprising suddenness. But she never so far forgot her principles as to let them dictate a mood. She never recognized any of the naïve collisions of men and women.