Felix became aware of himself, standing bareheaded a few steps from the door of his studio, gazing at the moon. He was aware of the absurdity of that moment of moonstruck vision. He remembered the errand he was upon, and how weighted with tragedy it had seemed a minute since. He realized the symbolic character of his departure from the studio. Yes—symbolic! For he knew now that he did not care two pins for Phyllis—as a person. What Rose-Ann had said of him was utterly true. He did not care for persons—not even for Rose-Ann. He lived in a world of ideas. And because he had found the idea of Rose-Ann as his jailor intolerable, he had taken her at her word, accepted his liberation, gone out of the door. But not—he smiled at the foolish thought—not into another captivity, not into the warm, constraining, anxious arms of Phyllis, or any other! No—he was free now of the idea of that tyranny; and Rose-Ann was free of it. With her gesture motioning him to go, she had broken the intolerable chain that had irked their lives. Free now, his own master, drawing his breath without permission from any other living being, once more able to call his soul his own, he could enjoy at last the companionship, in a common love of beauty, of the one being on earth who loved beauty as he loved it—and who understood freedom and the need of freedom better, indeed, than he had ever understood it! She had never lied to herself or to him. From the first she had disdained to accept the promises which he had been so eager to make. She was a true child of the moon, blessed with its gifts, no staid denizen of the sober realm of day, but fleet of soul and changeable and free like her immortal mother and mistress! No—he realized it now—no mere woman could hold his love; it had been folly to hope and pretend so; not Rose-Ann, not Phyllis, not any woman. But one who could be more and less than woman, who did not, as mortal women do, want to own and be owned; who possessed herself with a divine aloofness, who had her own orbit that nothing could deflect—in her he could find a companionship deeper than any mortal love.