Nan felt the hand on hers tighten. She put her other hand over it, and thought. What could she tell her? These matters were too deep in the causes of things for man to have caught a glimpse of them, except now and then darkly through some poet's mind. There was one word that, to a poet's mind only, might have illumined the darkness if only for an instant: beauty, that was the word. Mankind could not look on beauty such as this and not desire, for a moment at least, to possess it utterly. But these things belonged to the dark places where brute nature wrought her spells. And there were other beauties, other enchantments, and of these, what could Tira, her mind moulded by the brutal influences of her life, see, except as dreams of her own, not as having wholesome correspondences in the mind of man? Could she guess what the appeal of her loveliness would meet in Raven? Fastidious standards, pride of honor, pride of race. The jungle, in itself, was as hateful to him as it could be to her, who had been dragged through its fetid undergrowth with a violence that had cut indelible marks into her. But for him, Raven--as Nan believed she knew him and as Tira, her striving mind obscured by the veil of her remembered past, could never know--hadn't the jungle something for him beyond choking savors and fierce destructive poisons? Didn't he know that even that miasma nourished wholesome virtues, strength, abstinence, infinite compassion, if you crossed the horrible expanse to the clear air beyond? Tira, fair as her mind was in its untouched integrity, hated the jungle, but it was a part of the wrong life had done her that she could not, highly as she worshiped Raven, keep herself from seeing his kinship to the natural earth as Martin's kinship with it, Tenney's--all the beasts who had desired her. How to tell her that? How to tell her that although it was most loving of her to save Raven from the curse she believed to be upon all men, he would save himself? "They think," Tira continued, in a voice rough enough to hurt the ear, "there's suthin' about me--different. An' they feel as if, if they owned me body an' soul they'd be--I dunno what they'd be." "They think they'd be gods," Nan's mind supplied. "You are beauty, Tira. You are the cup. They think if they could drink of you they would never thirst again." "An' now," said Tira, "s'pose a man like--like him--s'pose it looked to him some minute he never'd so much as expected--s'pose it looked to him as if he'd be made if he owned me body an' soul. Well! That's easy, you say. If I love him, what's my body an' what's my soul? Offer 'em to him, quick. An' wouldn't I, if that was all? Wouldn't I?" She called it sharply, in an angry challenge. "Yes," said Nan quietly, "I know you would." "Well," said Tira, "what then? It wouldn't be any more"--her eyes, glancing here and there in troubled search for help in her impossible task of speech--"like them daffies over there. 'Twould be--mud."