When they parted at midnight and she walked slowly up the stairs alone--Ida had dismissed Mowbray an hour since--she sighed again. Why didn’t she feel the pull? What was the nature of that mysterious current that seemed to vibrate between two people only out of the world’s billions, and was quite independent of mental identities? Certainly passion was not the only source. If she had been free and never had met Gregory Compton she would have married Valdobia and given him all he craved; for his magnetism was by no means confined to his brain. Why could not she love him as it was? She had not been the heroine of one of those passionate love affairs that leave a woman cold for several years, perhaps for ever. The intensity of emotion she had experienced during these months in Europe had been one-sided, a mere madness of the imagination. She had yet to realise that a woman can live more profoundly and completely with a man in her imagination than when in daily contact with his discouraging weaknesses, his inability to reach her impossible standard, and impinged upon by the disintegrating forces of daily life. Such women as Ora Blake, endowed with a certain measure of creative imagination, yet spending their maturing years unnaturalised citizens in a cross-section of life which barely brushes their aloofness in passing, develop as unnormally as those that cultivate this exotic garden of the mind for fame and fortune. If they find a mate while the imagination is still as young as their years, these highly organised women, with every sense and faculty keenly alert, and stimulated by mental contact as others may be by drugs and wine, have the opportunity at least to be the happiest beings on earth. If they marry a brute, or are forced to fight the world for bread, a wide channel is dug in the brain through which flow the normal and crowding thoughts of the average, commonplace, adaptable woman; which is perhaps the best of all educations for life. But Ora had married a kind prosaic man who soon learned to let her alone, and kept her in a comfort that burdened her days with leisure. If she had been unimaginative no harm would have been done. She either would have grown fond of her essential husband and become a domestic angel, or consoled herself with society and bridge. But, misplaced in life, she belonged to the intellectual aristocracy of the earth, who are the loneliest of its inhabitants, unless they can establish an invisible bond with their fellow-beings by offerings from that mental garden which is at once their curse and their compensation for the doubtful gift of life.