As this "splendid specimen of the vigorous young male smoothed back her hair, devouring her with his eyes . . . a delicious languor . . . as of one yielding to an anæsthetic . . . was stealing over her. Husband, children—everything of her outside life slipped away." And at his kiss "primordial passion" awoke. "Feeling herself a live coal of shame from head to foot she raised herself slightly upwards towards him, and with closed eyes and utter abandon, passionately returned the pressure of his lips." This "pure" woman, already a mother, is fired by a "vulgar wager," a vain boy wanting to kiss her "for the mere enjoyment of the contact," in the conservatory, heated by champagne and the dance. There is no attempt to suggest real feeling, the passionate awakening that _may_ come after a foolish marriage; when the "right man" stirs unknown depths, beating down "fears, doubts, self-distrusts." She crumples up at the first chance shot. No wonder that, after some months' experimenting among men, she grows "afraid—afraid! . . . now I know I'm liable to—to kindle, suddenly, inexplicably. . . . There's a man here—one of those to-night. He's unclean, through and through. I never used to attract that type. And now apparently I do. The 'sleeping fire' . . . he sees it in me and tries to feed it. He sickens me! Oh, I'm frightened. Suppose one day that type _ceased_ to sicken me. I've seen the demi-monde at the tables. Their faces haunt me. _They_ began with the sleeping fire, and men fed it and fed it till it became a furnace . . . for me, it's been like summer lightning so far . . . only summer lightning. Look after me, help me, lest it ever be forked lightning . . . the lightning that can strike and destroy." So she appeals to the husband she had originally accepted as "a crutch," and who had looked upon her as "furniture." Fortunately—for the children, because he has "changed, broadened in outlook and understanding"—he is ready "to build afresh, stone by stone." We admit that Mr. Henderson's moral is sound enough; he has, indeed, found "the way of salvation." But he has _not_ drawn for us the "innately decent and fine woman." Viva is weak and abnormally sensual from the first; pulled out of the mire by luck, human kindness, and a dim taste for "the things that are good, decent, and worth while"; _inherited from clean-living forebears_. The danger for her was exceptional, not "that _natural_ yearning" against which "_all women_ must be _eternally_ on their guard." Her husband, we notice, hoped to guard his daughter "_against her mother's tendency_."