He was ill. The side-door of a famous hotel yawned to him directly across the street from his step. He was not sure they would take him. Registering, he stopped to think where he was from, adding Auckland, N. Z.... Yes, his bags would be brought from the station. They gave him a room, and Bellair stood in the centre of it. For a few moments he actually weakened--limbs and mind. It wasn’t New York alone, nor the sordid incident across the street, reminding him so ruthlessly of Lot & Company and all that had been and was still to do; rather it was a giving way to a loneliness that had been rising for almost a month, wearing him to a shadow of himself, and giving him battle night and morning. Like many another solitary young man, he had brooded much upon what a certain woman might be. He had found that in those women he met, certain spaces must be filled in by his own compassion--and these spaces did not endure. Always in a test they separated from the reality. But the Faraway Woman day by day had fulfilled; even where his idealism failed, she completed the picture of the woman above him and of irresistible attraction. She had come nearer and nearer. She was magic in this way. He had regarded her at first distantly and askance at the rail of the _Jade_. A gasp now came from him. That was so impossible and long ago.... She had not called him any more than a peasant woman. And yet one after another her rarities had unfolded; it would always be so. She was the very fountain of romance to him; the essence of whose attraction is variableness of days. Of all the days together, there had been no two alike--no two hours alike. He had watched her face under the light--never twice the same. The child, the maiden, the mother, the love-woman, the saint--lips passional, devotional ... then those wonder-moments when the old tragedies came back to her eyes. They stirred him as if he had known her long ago; and yet nothing of this had come to him at first. How crude and coarse he had been not to see. Lot & Company and New York had covered her from his eyes. He had to fast and pray and concentrate upon her being, as a devotee upon the ball of crystal to begin upon her mysteries. Every man has his Lot & Company, his New York--the forces that bind him to the world. A man bound to the world can see but the body of a thing--the paint of a picture, just the outline and pigment of a picture or a bit of nature--just the body of a woman.