She had liked many men as friends, and was proud of the fact that only the more intelligent were attracted to her, but she had arrived at the age of twenty-six without even imagining herself seriously in love, so intense was her idealism. This was another of her deliberate cultivations, for here also was she resolute that as nature had done so much for her, marking her as a girl apart, so should she insist upon having an uncommon mate. It was to this end even more than for the barren satisfaction of pleasing Mother Nature that she had tilled the garden of her mind with both science and imagination. When she loved, it should be like a woman, of course; she had no delusions about making over human nature to suit passing fashions in woman; but while she never ignored the vital passions that formed the basis of her unique personality and strong will, she was determined that they should be quickened only by a man who would make equal demands upon all that was fine in her character and aspiring in her mind. The awful collapse of this cherished structure, her spiritual house, under her hopeless and violent passion for Dwight Rush had almost demoralised her. After she had won herself to reason once more, she still had sat, stunned, among the ruins. It was true that Rush was all that she had demanded of man and that he emanated a promise of happiness along strictly modern lines--which was all she asked, being no romantic fool; but not only had she loved him unasked, sacrificing the first and perhaps the dearest of her dreams, to be wooed and awakened and surprised, but, accepting the inevitable (the man being overburdened, like most busy young Americans, and unselfconscious), she deliberately had set herself to awaken _him_--and for nought. For worse than nought: he had instantly taken fright and withdrawn. Of the terrific upheaval of that time, like some graveyard of the sea flung putrid and phosphorescent to the surface by submarine vulcanism, she had ceased to think as soon as her will was reinstated in command. Immediately she had striven to rebuild her house lest she be swamped in mere femaleness, so permanently demoralised that life would be quite unendurable. She had cultivated the heights too long. She might tumble off occasionally, but in no other atmosphere could she breathe deeply and realise herself, find any measure of content. It had occurred to her that if she had been born in the gutter and grown to adolescence with no ennobling influence, she would have developed into a notable force for evil. At all events, she liked to think so; many women of stainless lives do.