Raven carried the look of her anxious, warm-colored face with him. It was all motherly. Yet she had no children. Jerry lived under the daily chrism of that soft well-wishing. And there was the woman up the road, looking like a spiritual mother of men and strangely, mysteriously, also like the ancient lure that makes men mad, and she had to fight like a tigress for the mere life of her child. The contrast leaped into the kaleidoscopic disorder he saw now as life like a brilliant, bizarre fragment to make the whole scheme (if the scheme could be even estimated by mortal minds) more disorderly still. But he was tired and he slept. It would be good, he had thought for many weeks now, when he felt himself drifting off, to sleep forever. To-night he did not want that everlasting sleep. He wanted life, life to its full of power and probity, to stand between the woman and her terror. Suddenly he woke, and lay, his heart beating hard at the sound of the pines in the grove. Charlotte had done her best to put the breadth of the house between him and their lamenting, but their voices crept round the corner and into his open windows, and invaded his mind. He lay there, the wind on his face and that sighing melancholy of theirs calling him to an answering sadness of his own. And now it was not his inexplicable panic of disaffection toward the earth as God had made it, but a pageant of darkness where formless terrors moved, all hostile to the woman. At this moment, she seemed to him the point of blinding pain about which the general misery of the world revolved. She was beauty in the flesh. She led the mind to the desire of holy things. At least, that was where she had led his mind. But the cruelty of creation was not content with setting her loose in the world of created things with the gift of beauty and holiness in her hand. It had veiled her also with the mysterious magic that was simple enough and directly compelling enough to rouse the beast of jealousy, the beast of mastery, in the hearts of men. She did not seem to him an Aphrodite, bearing in her hand the cup of love. There was something childlike about her, something as virginal as in Nan. He could believe she would be endlessly pleased with simple things, that she could be made to laugh delightedly over the trivialities of daily life. But the hand of creation having made her, the brain of creation (that inexorable force bent only on perpetuation) saw she was too good a thing to be lost, too innocently persuasive to the passion of men. So it had thrown over her the veil of mystery and pronounced against her the ancient curse that she should be desired of many and yet too soft of her heart, too weak in her defenses, even to foresee the pitfalls that awaited her wandering feet and would sometime break her bones.