Mona held in her hand a book of musical sketches by an author unknown to her. It was entitled Melomaniacs. It had been given to her by Ulick Invern. But her attention had strayed from its pages to the spectacle of the night. She was not happy. Nor was she unhappy. A sense of emptiness oppressed her, the futility of matters mundane, love included, oppressed her consciousness. If she could but pin her faith to something tangible, concrete, make a definite act of affirmation before the veil of life, behind which was hidden the accomplices of her destiny. Know thyself! is wisdom, but if you are sick unto death with yourself and its petty, insistent claims upon your volitions, then forget thyself! might be a sounder motto. Mona had not the temperament dynamic; nor yet was she lymphatic. In the company of Ulick she had let herself go, as will some women in the more masterful grip of the male, without relinquishing the captaincy of her inner citadel. And now she had mentally dismissed her lover, realizing in a sudden illumination that his instability, as unstable as an anchor that drags, would be a bar to their happiness. She had tartly contradicted Alfred when he laboriously hauled out, as if from a secret place, the chief defects in Ulick's character. Yet, she recognized the justice of the impeachment. Ulick was too fond of his pleasures, and girls were no doubt the stencil of his cardinal sin. Impotent to change his volatile nature--volatile, at least, where women were concerned--she had resolved on hearing of the Dora episode to break their friendship. She felt the wrench, especially this evening. She had returned from the seashore promising herself that she would be strong. Instead, she felt uneasy, full of barren desire, giddiness in her head and a sort of green-sickness in her stomach. She recognized the symptoms, as would any full-blooded girl of normal instincts; she also recognized the necessity of suppressing certain emotions. So she resumed reading The Rim of Finer Issues. She didn't like it as far as she had gone. The writer, evidently unformed, floundered between Henry James and the new French symbolists; psychological analysis was intermingled with symbolical prose, the admixture proving rather confusing to her tormented spirit. She longed for clarity. Still she continued to read in a cursory manner.... Then her attention was caught by a subtitle: Frustrate. No doubt the prose-poem threatened by the heroine with the iron-colored eyes, or was it rust-colored hair? She read on and with increasing interest this rhapsody of the sex-cells.