Doubtless Phil and I must have agreed with him--from how differently anxious a spirit!--but all three of us would then have proved quite wrong. To intoxicate Susan, Maltby did find a difficult, in the end an impossible, task. He took her--not unwilling to enter and appraise any circle from high heaven to nether hell--to all the right, magical places, exposed her to all the heady influences of his world; and she found them enormously stimulating--to her sense of the ironic. Maltby's sensuous, quick-witted friends simply would not come true for Susan when she first moved among them; they were not serious about anything but refined sensation and she could not take their refined sensations seriously; but for a time they amused her, and she relished them much as Charles Lamb relished the belles and rakes of Restoration Drama: "They are a world of themselves almost as much as fairyland." To their intimate dinners, their intimate musical evenings, their intimate studio revels--she came on occasion with Maltby as to a play: "altogether a speculative scene of things." She could, in those early weeks, have borrowed Lamb's words for her own comedic detachment: "We are amongst a chaotic people. We are not to judge them by our usages. No reverend institutions are insulted by their proceedings--for they have none among them. No peace of families is violated--for no family ties exist among them.... No deep affections are disquieted, no holy-wedlock bands are snapped asunder--for affection's depth and wedded faith are not the growth of that soil. There is neither right nor wrong.... Of what consequence is it to Virtue or how is she at all concerned?... The whole thing is a passing pageant." It is probable that Maltby at first mistook her interest in the spectacle for the preliminary stirrings of its spell within her; but he must soon have been aware--for he had intelligence--that Susan was not precisely flinging herself among his maskers with the thrilled abandon that would betoken surrender. She was not afraid of these clever, beauty-loving maskers, some of whom bore celebrated names; it was not timidity that restrained her; she, too, loved beauty and lilting wit and could feel joyously at ease among them--for an hour or two--once in a while. But to remain permanently within those twining circles, held to a limited dream, when she was conscious of wilder, freer, more adventurous spaces without----! Why should she narrow her sympathies like that? It never occurred to her as a temptation to do so. She had drunk of a headier cup, and had known a vaster intoxication. From the magic circle of her cedar trees, in that lonely abandoned field back of Mount Carmel, the imagination of her heart had long since streamed outward beyond all such passing pageants, questing after a dream that does not pass.... No gilded nutshell could bound her now; she could become the slave of no _intersected_ ring.... Lesser incantations were powerless.