But as V.V. came with a swift steady stride, the free rapid movement of a woman who had been much with horses, who had ridden from childhood, Gillian knew, with a thrill of recognition so strange, so new to her experience that the shock of it took away all sense of every other consideration, that she beheld in the flesh the very image of a perfection wrought by her own imaginings in the secret places of her dreaming mind. This was not a beautiful creature for all the world to gape at, it was the figure—unique of its kind—for which the shrine of her spirit had stood empty and waiting until now.[52] A definitely masculine figure, as the passage goes on to emphasize, and a masterly analysis of romantic love-at-first-sight. The woman’s voice is flat and unlovely, but Gillian, for all her musical ear, is too enthralled to care. All that she is aware of for some time are the lavish personal ministrations and caresses with which she is showered. She learns without grasping the implications that V.V. has lived with a long succession of women, many of them minor actresses. Early in her life there was one, mentioned seldom and cryptically, on whose account she was evidently disowned by her family and incurred debts not yet paid. Before long, Gillian’s emotional preoccupation evokes remonstrance from her sister, the once-adoring student, and the latter’s recently acquired sculptor-husband; but to her their warnings are absurd. The sculptor lived before his marriage with a faunlike musician whom he loved and protected from fortune-hunting women. This elfin Heinrich is as bewitched as Gillian by V.V.’s physical beauty, and as V.V. has an eye to the main chance, she inveigles him into an engagement. As soon as he becomes importunate and “boring,” however, instinct conquers interest and she shakes him off, clinching the matter one evening by refusing an invitation because she must bathe Gillian and put her to bed. With a stolen key, V.V. manages to enter the apartment where Gillian is actually bathing in a meager British “portable” before an open fire, and attempts to embrace her. Gillian, though excited by the caresses, fights her off in sudden horrified realization of what their long ambiguous dalliance has been leading to. For the first time in her life she comprehends the passion she has observed in others, and her revulsion is violent. Heinrich, however, reads quite another meaning into the shadow-struggle he sees silhouetted on her drawn blind, and goes home to shoot himself. Gillian falls gravely ill from shock, but finally, safe in her sister’s comfortable home, regains her balance.