When she reached home she forgot her horror of death chambers, and went to Miss Tremont’s room and flung herself on the bed. She did not cry—her tears had all been spent; but she felt something of the profound misery of the last year in Monterey. During the intervening years she had seen little of the cloven hoof of human nature; the occasional sin over on Hog Heights hardly counted; creatures of the lower conditions had no high lights to make the shadows startling. But to-day the horror of old experiences rushed over her; she was filled with a profound loathing of life, of human nature. So far, of love, in its higher sense—if it possessed such a part—she had seen nothing; of sensuality, too much. True, she had spent two weeks with Miss Galpin, during that estimable young woman’s engagement; but Miss Galpin took love as a sort of front-parlour, evening-dress affair, and Patience had not deigned to be interested. She had speculated somewhat over Miss Tremont’s early romance, but could only conclude that it was one of those undeveloped little histories that so many old maids cherish. She recalled all the love stories she had read. Even the masters were insipid when they attempted to portray spiritual love. It was only when they got down to the congenial substratum of passion that they wrote of love with colour and fire. Was she to believe that it did not exist,—this union of soul and mind? Her dreams receded, and refused to cohere. She wondered, with natural egoism, if any girl of her age had ever received so many shocks. She was on the threshold of life, with a mass of gross material out of which to shape her mental attitude to existing things. True, she had met only women of relative sinlessness during these last years, but their purity was uninteresting because it was that of people mentally limited, and possessed of the fad of the unintellectual. Moreover, they had their erotism, the oddest, most unreal, and harmless erotism the world has known in the last two thousand years; and after all quite incidental: her keen eyes had long since observed that the old maids were far more religious than the married women, that the girls cooled perceptibly to the great abstraction as soon as a concrete candidate was approved. She longed passionately for Miss Tremont. All her old restlessness and doubt had returned with the flight of that ardent absorbing personality. She wished that she could have been remodelled; for, after all, the dear old lady, whatever her delusions, had been happy. But she was still Patience Sparhawk; she could only be thankful that Miss Tremont had cemented her hatred of evil. She rose abruptly, worn out by conjectures and analysis that led nowhere, and went out into the woods. “Oh,” she said, lifting her arms, “this at least is beautiful.”