"I am no impressionable boy. I know what the woman must be who writes to me." There was something of seership in his thus irrevocably affixing his ideal to the human woman who held the pen.... His photograph was frequently enough in the press--a big browed, plain-faced young man with a jaw less aggressive than she would have imagined, and a mouth rather finely arched for a reformer who was to whip the world into line. And then there was a discovery. In a magazine dated a decade before, she ran upon his picture among the advertising pages. Verses of his were announced to appear during the year to come. He could not have been over twenty for this picture, and to her it was completely charming--a boy out of the past calling blithely; a poetic face, too, reminding her of prints she had seen of an early drawing of Keats's head now in London--eager, sensitive, all untried!... It was not without resistance that she acknowledged herself _closer to the boy_--that something of the man was beyond her. There was a mystery left upon the face by the intervening years, "while the tireless soul etched on...." Should she ever know? Or must there always be this dim, hurting thing? Was it all the etching of the _soul_--that this later print revealed?... These were but bits of shadow--ungrippable things which made her wings falter for a moment and long for something sure to rest upon, but Reifferscheid's first talk about Charter, the latter's book, and the letters--out of these were reconstructed her tower of shining purity. There were times when Paula's heart, gathering all its tributary sympathies, poured out to the big figure in the West in a deep and rushing torrent. Her entire life was illuminated by these moments of ardor. Here was a giving, in which the thought of actual possession had little or no part. Her finest elements were merged into one-pointed expression. It is not strange that she was dismayed by the triumphant force of the woman within her, nor that she recalled one of the first of Madame Nestor's utterances, "Nonsense, Paula, the everlasting feminine is alive in every movement of you." Yet this outpouring was lofty, and noon-sky clear. An emotion like this meant brightness to every life that contacted it.... But ruthlessly she covered, hid away even from her own thoughts, illuminations such as these. Here was a point of tragic significance. Out of the past has come this great fear to strong women--the fear to let themselves love. This is one of the sorriest evolutions of the self-protecting instinct. So long have women met the tragic fact of fickleness and evasion in the men of their majestic concentrations--that fear puts its weight against the doors that love would open wide.