Across a large bare room a young man was seated, writing, at a table. A broad tri-coloured sash barred his blue, wide-collared coat and white waistcoat. He had divested himself of the cocked hat with three absurdly large plumes of blue, white, and red which lay upon the table and the long hair of his uncovered head reached almost to his shoulders. He looked up, as if startled, at his visitor, looked up with a young face whose intellectual keenness, whose vivid, passionate eyes above the long nose and almost ascetic mouth were strangely, disconcertingly reminiscent of--of---- “_Jim!_” gasped the young woman in the chair, feeling herself in that curious state of split identity where the unaffected, remote Ego registers without controlling the adventures of a dream. “Shh!” he murmured in his turn, bewildered to find himself as it were looking at his own personality and, though as at the other side of a partition in his soul, experiencing the feelings of the man at whom he gazed. An echo of a surprise, of a mysterious surprise that disturbed him to the depths--of something that had come, startlingly new and powerful though not yet fully manifest, into his life--reverberated in the recesses of his being as he contemplated the girl. And then a counter-impulse flooded him, the impulse that made him set his mouth, rejecting with an assertion of his own personality wedded to some vague ideal, the vulgar influence of a human emotion. He felt as though the girl approached _him_, as she moved toward that young man who regarded her with a stern frigidity. “_Citoyenne?_” he was surprised to find himself murmuring the coldly polite query, as though repeating it after that insultingly superior young man. He heard the gasp of the young woman at his side as of someone infinitely remote from him. His real being was in that large bare room where the superb young republican scrutinized the young girl with a cold glance that put her out of countenance. Yet how beautiful she was as she blushed up to her eyes, youthful modesty in confusion! He felt something flush warm within his breast, a vague emotion that dissipated the assurance underneath his sternly maintained aspect. Before she had spoken, an alarm to the threatened supremacy of his cold reason rang through the depths of him. He reacted with a severity that he obscurely felt to be excessive, reiterated almost with menace “_Citoyenne?_” Was the word really uttered from his lips? He did not know.