Mona, under the skin, was a matter-of-fact woman for whom Mother Nature could do no wrong. She loved children, and in default of them she delighted in the poetic fiction of dream-children. Ulick had only to pronounce the names of Grane and Shamus to see her face swept as if by joyful news. Temperamentally she was elected to happy motherhood. This idea caused him much disquietude. * * * * * With intense interest he read of Easter's début at Munich. She had sung Isolde with immense success. The cables were choked with stories of her brilliant singing, dramatic acting. The three Brunnhildes followed, and a few weeks later a royal command came from Baireuth; Queen Cosima graciously permitted the American girl to be a "guest" for a week. Again--Isolde, Brunnhilde, and most startling of all--Kundry. She would be the first American to sing in Parsifal at Baireuth. After that, offers from Paris, Berlin, London, and no doubt, from New York. But the Metropolitan House management was impenetrable. Easter had changed her name to Istar.... Istar the daughter of sin! chuckled Alfred Stone.... THE SIXTH GATE _At the sixth gate, the warden stripped her; he took the rings from her feet, the rings from her hands_.... I Ulick earnestly pondered the character of Mona. Their long conversations about the world, the flesh, and the devil revealed, as in a mirror, her soul. She was essentially a pure girl, because she saw no evil in life. Nature was her sole standard. A pantheist in petticoats. She was as severe in her strictures upon prudish women as her mother was in her judgments upon the contemporaneous girl. Ulick called it an inverted dogmatism. But, then, he reflected, scratch any woman and you come on a squaw; only the squaw is truer to type than the modern woman. He noted, too, the gradual encroachment upon his time, his spirit, of Mona. Her tenacity alarmed him. She said nothing about marriage; that side of the question never obtruded. Mona was a free-thinker à outrance; a law unto herself. She seemed to be without the prejudices of her sex. She didn't interest herself in the woman-question, which she believed was purely an individual one. Let each woman agitate for herself. Let her revolt be within four walls. Let every tub stand on its own bottom. The most refractory male is always forced to lower his standard before the conquering arms of woman. Rabelais--or is it Balzac?--calls it by its true name: the glue-pot of love. Walt Whitman goes him one better. Nevertheless, Ulick detected signs of the tyrannical female in her perpetual hovering about him. Even of the most tender, flower-like women one might say: This is the shrew Shakespeare drew. Every woman is a potential shrew, he decided, and Ophelia would have been no exception if she had married Hamlet. All men are born to be henpecked. Celibates, whether priests or laymen, are not exempted from this primal curse. If it isn't a female relative then it's a