She had retired into some inner chamber of her self, to think and dream; and the books, the walks, the wanderings among fragments of dead antiquity, the solitude, were all a part of this dream life.... The books which she read, a chapter or two at a time, putting one aside to take up another, were such as took the mind into strange worlds, like “Thais” and “The Napoleon of Notting Hill”; or those which told the adventures of a soul in contact with a new world which it finds strange and perilous, like “The Damnation of Theron Ware” and “The Red and the Black.” Or books of anthropology and of poetry, those two ideal guides of the stay-at-home traveller in quest of strangeness. So much Felix curiously noted, and reflected that he had been at home in those strange worlds all his life and was now trying a greater adventure—the discovery of the familiar and commonplace world in which he actually lived.... When Felix left the office, having hastily written “something light” for the editorial page, or furbished up a few paragraphs for the dramatic column, he would come home to the studio and work fiercely and painfully for two or three hours. “But, Felix, you work too _hard_!” Rose-Ann had said to him. “That isn’t the way to work!” Whatever the way to work might be, he had not yet found it; but at least he could try.... And late in the afternoon, throwing down his pen with a sense of duty done, he would go to the Park, and find Rose-Ann waiting for him on a bench, with book and notebook in her lap. They would find some cool place to dine, and then walk for hours along the shore of the lake, talking. Yes, Rose-Ann had changed, become less fiery and impatient, more calm. And coming at this hour out of that inner chamber of self in which she spent her days, she brought to him quaint and lovely thoughts, delicate and ironic fancies, things that charmed and allured his imagination. Sometimes she talked of the books she had been reading, and enriched their stories as she told them with a beauty that came from her own mind.