Once, many years ago, a man had asked her one night to go with him to his rooms, much in the same way as he would have offered to take her out to tea. It was no temptation to her—she knew, besides, that her mother was waiting up for her, which made it quite impossible. She knew the man very slightly, did not like him, and was cross because he was to see her home; and it was not because her senses were stirred, but from purely mental curiosity, that she turned the question for a moment over in her mind: what if she did?—what would be her feelings if she threw overboard will, self-control, and her old faith? A voluptuously exciting shiver ran through her at the thought. Was that kind of life more pleasant than her own? She was not pleased with hers that evening; she had again sat watching those who danced, she had tasted the wine and had listened to the music, and she had felt the dreadful loneliness of being young and not knowing how to dance or how to speak the language of the other young people and share their laughter, but she had tried to smile and look and talk as if she enjoyed it. And when she walked home in the icy-cold spring night she knew that at eight o’clock next morning she had to be at the school to act as substitute for one of the teachers. She was working that time at her big picture, but everything she did seemed dull and meaningless, and at six o’clock she had to go home and teach mathematics to her private pupils. She was very hard worked; she sometimes felt her nerves strained to the utmost, and did not know how she would be able to carry on till the long vacation. For an instant she felt herself drawn by the man’s cynicism—or thought she was—but she smiled at him and said “no” in the same dry and direct way that he had asked her. He was a fool, after all, for he began preaching to her—first commonplace flattery, then sentimental nonsense about youth and spring, the right and freedom of passion, and the gospel of the flesh, until she simply laughed at him and hailed a passing cab. And now—she was old enough now to understand those who brutally refused to deny themselves anything in life—who simply gave in and drifted, but the greenhorns, who boasted of having a mission to fill, when they enjoyed life after their fashion, the champions of the eternal rights of nature, who did not trouble to brush their teeth or clean their nails—they could not impose on her.