When a woman is groping about among the mysteries of her great passion she has little to give the world, and, all the forces of her being consuming her inwardly, her magnetism is diminished. With the average woman this matters little--she merely bores her friends; but in the case of a princess, with but a season perhaps at her disposal within whose limits to preserve the map of Europe, or alter it to her liking, the untimely advent of love might blight her in the very plethora of her opportunities. Ranata realized this danger after a few days of complete indifference to anything but her own thoughts and the presence of Fessenden Abbott, discovered that she had fallen back into the niche of the unapproachable princess, from which only he could draw her. The moment she appreciated her condition she roused, when in public, the energies of her mind, wrenching it from her inner life. A career she was determined to have; and although she could not recall the enthusiasm of those first weeks in Hungary, her purpose was revitalized by the long shadows of bitterness and despair which the future cast back to her. True to her compact, she endeavored to eject that future from her imagination, and in greater part succeeded, for she had more wisdom than most women, and appreciated the priceless value of the immediate happiness. She was content, and in brief intervals intensely happy; her imagination was liberated and her power to feel superlative. The knowledge that both imagination and capacity for living must prove her scourge hereafter but made her cultivate both the more ardently while briefly mistress of her fate. And the concentrated ardor of which Fessenden was capable in the rare moments they found alone, contrasted with his average mood when he seemed to belong so wholly to himself, fascinated her far more than any constant evidence of her consuming influence over him would have done. Her own powerful individuality recognized the separateness of his, and was content to touch it in fugitive moments only. The archaic poem of eternal oneness made no appeal to her. Passionate love and loyal friendship she had to offer in the fullest equipment granted to mortals, but the development of her own individuality in its incorruptible silences must go on forever, submerged only by the primal tides; and so her instincts and her endowment saved her from the pursuit of that will-o’-the-wisp which most women follow until it hides in the grave. She saw that Fessenden recognized in her this disunion of temperament and personality, for although his were the masculine limitations which deprived him of the comprehensions women think they want, the needs of his own soul were too great for blindness to another that had come so close.