What Nature’s purpose was no man could guess. But that she had a purpose, methodical creature that she was, no intelligent man could doubt. But she had passed over one Gita Carteret, even refusing to unbalance those cells, with everything working in her favor. The result was that Gita Carteret had been isolated high and dry. A rock in mid-ocean. A capacity for agreeable friendships, but about as emotional as an unhatched egg. Well, that was that. She’d never think of it again if she could avoid it. But insularity had its compensations! She felt as if something resistant in her brain were straining and creaking as she swung it ruthlessly to that strange moment when De Witt Turner’s words—uttered more or less at random—had turned her mind into a cauldron. But that frenzied moment had not only been a revelation but a deliverance. She had experienced a sensation of exhaustion when it was over, during which she felt that something had exploded, then taken wing. That such an access of hatred for a side of life still unexplored would never come again. She had been delivered—and for what? Not for Eustace Bylant. Her recoil from that gleam in his eyes when he bent forward to kiss her was conclusive. No need to be asexual to be revolted at the thought of kissing a man she did not love and never could love. Even his light and frequent touch, of which she had barely been conscious as long as the lid was down, would be unendurable hereafter. He “loved” her, of course. Always had. She had kept the lid down with a vengeance! She must have known from the first that he was in love with her in the orthodox male fashion—known it down in that, automatically recording invisible register; but that censored mind of hers had turned its back blithely; kept its conscious part suspended in that rarefied ether she had chosen as her habitat, peopled with queer eidola of her human acquaintance. Too bad! It would have been the ideal solution to love Eustace, who had so much to offer, with whom she could live her life in a companionship found by few women with the men of their choice. But she did not. She almost hated him. He must never return here. She’d write and tell him so at once. If he hadn’t loved her she’d be willing to go on. But she had had one of her illuminating flashes. She knew he had reached the limit of his endurance.