Early in the day she had brought down from the attic the gown of gold tissue she had worn the night of the party, and she went up to her bedroom and put it on. The wigs had been returned, but she powdered her hair and even put a patch on her cheek. She had a whimsical idea that in capturing the outward semblance of the old Gita Carterets she would banish the last of those inhibitions which had made her so different not only from them but from all other girls, and, with her saner knowledge of life, help her to that exact understanding of herself she had fancied she possessed in the past. She locked the doors of the drawing-room, lit several candles, and established herself in one of the few comfortable chairs a century, singularly indifferent to comfort, had produced. “Now!” she said aloud, “off with the lid.” And she routed a last moment of shrinking. Nature had endowed her superlatively, and a neurosis, inevitable in a sensitive aspiring fastidious girl, had given her a rabid hatred of a sex designed, among other purposes, to complete her own. Her abhorrence of sex in all its manifestations had been, in a measure, a subtle protest against thwarted romance: an invention of the Teutonic-Nordics, to be sure, but none the less potent when rubbed in by the centuries. Nor had modernism killed it. Realists were not so much realists from reaction or conviction as from resentment at their own inability to realize it. They were in the same class with radicals who hated a society in which they were incapacitated by natural equipment to achieve success. Life, literature, nor history would be sufferable without the glamour of romance, however personally immiscible. The invention and constant use of the word “love” was proof of that. Mere decency ordained that a certain enchantment be shed over a function as native as hunger, where personal selection, imposed by civilization, was concerned. Well, she accepted the fact. Also the fact that what her three friends called a sound endocrine constitution had saved her from becoming one of those semi-outlaws so freely discussed in her new circle. That was a phase she had no desire to dwell on, but she faced it squarely. Such women, she had been told, had sometimes the most idealized relationships, a mental and spiritual harmony seldom found with men; being rarely fools. Through this ominous lack of balance in the ductless glands and an arbitrary gift from Nature of cells which had no legitimate place in their anatomy, they were not only enabled but compelled to love their own sex; and as faithfully, protectively, and self-sacrificingly, as those that were fitted with normal response to man. Often more so. They were by no means mere sensualists. Nature here was as inexorable as elsewhere and she had not waited upon the decadence of civilizations to develop the type. It had existed since the dawn of history. No doubt since the dawn of time.