She had coiled her soft ashen hair loosely on the top of her head, pulling it out a little about her face—she wore no bangs. Her restless eyes were dark and clear and sparkling, her mouth pink. She carried her slender figure with a free graceful poise. The carriage of her head was almost haughty. Her hips had a generous swell. Her hands and teeth were very white. “I certainly have a look of race,” she thought, “if I’m not a beauty. I’d give a good deal to know that my ancestors really did have good blood in their veins. I don’t care so much for money, but I’d like to be sure of that.” After breakfast she wandered about restlessly. She had known few moments of peace since Miss Peele’s visit. The train had been fired, and her being was in a tumult. Beverly Peele, the Stranger, and the vague ideals of her earlier girlhood were inextricably mixed. The result was a being before whom she trembled with mingled rapture and terror. Her vivid imagination had evoked a distinct entity, and the love scenes that had been enacted between the girl and this wholly satisfactory eidolon were such as have time out of mind made life as it is seem a singularly defective composition to the wondering mind of woman. At times she was terrified at the rich possibilities of her nature, so little suspected. The revelation gave her vivid comprehension of woman’s tremendous power for sacrifice and surrender, possibilities of which she had read with much curiosity, but little sympathy. For those women she felt a warm honour, a fierce desire to espouse their cause. For Rosita she had only loathing and contempt. It was not only passion that was awake. Sentiment, that finer child of the brain, and the sweet faint feeling which assuredly lingers about the region of the heart, whatever its physical cause may be, were there in full measure to lend their potent lashings to that primeval force which is as mighty in some women as in some men. It is doubtful if a woman ever loves a man when in his arms with the same exaltation of soul and passion which she feels for that creation of her brain that he little more than suggests, and that is only wholly hers when the man himself is absent. Imagination in woman is as arbitrary as desire in man, and she is beaten down and crushed by this imperious and capricious brain-imp so many times in her life that the wonder is she is not driven to the hopes and illusions of religion, or to humour, long before the skin has yellowed and the eye paled. And when the imagination has full sway, when the man has not been beheld, when he has been invested with every quality dear to the heart of the generously endowed woman, when, indeed, all eidola blend, and she has a confused vision of an immense and mighty force bearing down upon her which shall sweep every tradition out of existence and annihilate the material world, then assuredly man himself would do well to retire into obscurity and curse his shortcomings.