In the sickening distaste for herself and for those who had to make no concession to themselves for coming, inasmuch as society permitted; and who would be heartfully disappointed in a lecture on hygiene that did not discuss the more intimate matters of the senses, Paula did not appraise the opposite sex at any higher value. She merely reviewed matters which had come to her vividly as some of the crowning frailties of her own kind. The centre of the whole affair, Dr. Bellingham, was now introduced. He looked like a Dane at first glance. His was the size, the dusty look and the big bone of a Dane; the deep, downy paleness of cheek, the tumbled, though not mussy hair. He was heavy without being adipose, lean, but big-boned; his face was lined with years, though miraculously young in the texture of skin. The lips of a rather small and feminine mouth were fresh and red as a girl's. In the softness of complexion and the faintest possible undertone of color, it was impossible not to think of perfected circulation and human health brought to truest rhythm. The costliest lotions cannot make such a skin. It is organic harmony. Exterior decoration does not delude the seeing eye any more than a powder-magazine becomes an innocent cottage because its walls are vine-clad.... Directly behind her, Paula now heard a slow whisper: "I knew him twenty-five years ago, and he is not a moment older to look at." She seemed to have heard the voice before, and though the sentence surged with a dark significance through her mind, she did not turn. Bellingham's words were now caressing the intelligence of his audience. To Paula, his soft mouth was indescribably odious with cultured passion, red with replenishment, fresh with that sinister satisfaction which inevitably brings to mind a second figure, fallen, drained. His presence set to quivering within her, fears engendered from the great occult past. Strange deviltries would always be shadowed about the Bellingham image in her mind.... Here was a man who made a shrine of his body, invested it with a heavy hungering God, and taught others--women--to bow and to serve.