“She is, indeed. No wonder he’s bowled over.” But like Mrs. Pleyden, he had seen certain straying glances from Pelham’s unambiguous eyes. He had also noted the blush. Gita was a puzzle to him and he sometimes suspected she was still a puzzle to his friend, known as her husband. As a novelist he would have liked to solve it. His fiction, although it dealt with the prosaic realities of life, and he handled sex without tongs, was pervaded by a haunting almost poignant beauty, which drove from his inner being not from his theme. He was in no danger of falling in love with Gita, being quite satisfied with “Miss Forbes,” and, like musicians, preferring to find beauty on the abstract plane; but he never saw this particular beauty with her lofty “springing” little head, her black flashing eyes that seemed to carry back no farther than her mind, her curious aura of virginity, her contradictory magnetic personality and undeviating aloofness, and a certain checked sweetness with it all, without the sensation that some musical instrument within him was vibrating to new harmonies, and he longed to grasp and immortalize them. In other words he would have liked to make her the heroine of a novel. But the music was too elusive. He only faintly guessed what she suggested. She looked one thing and was so indisputably something else. Once he had tried to pump Elizabeth Pelham, but that loyal friend had laughed at his assumption of mystery. Gita was just Gita. One answer to the riddle, no doubt, was that the girl didn’t know herself. Something had arrested her development, and the man she had married that night when she came down the stairs and made himself nearly bawl outright with her astounding beauty, had as yet taught her nothing. He had met her several times before the wedding and many times since, and although she no longer treated every man as a possible enemy, she had changed not at all in essentials. But was she on the verge of a change of some sort? He noted that she looked tired and rather melancholy for the first time since he had known her . . . less assured. An ardent feminist, he believed in women taking precisely the same liberties with orthodoxies as men had done since the beginning of time; and if this entrancing creature had found she was mistaken and contemplated throwing over poor old Eustace, why not? Men were pretty philosophical these days—taking a leaf out of the age-old Book of Woman—and although it would come hard on Bylant, no doubt, if he found she preferred another man, he’d renounce her without whimpering. . . . But . . . would she? . . . did she? . . . or, why not? He felt there was a key to the riddle somewhere and wished he knew her history. But he knew nothing beyond the bare facts that she had been born and brought up in Europe, had lived for a time in California, and arrived in New Jersey shortly before her grandmother’s death. “What are you thinking of?” asked Gita, smiling. “You haven’t said a word for five minutes.”