Although his imagination had shown unexpected activities he indulged in no longings to mount with Gita into the empyrean and dwell with her in spiritual contact. He was a man and he wanted her, comprehensively, exclusively. And he wanted her because he loved her; he was suffering from no mere gust of passion. His scientific balance might be restored, he might converse with himself as reasonably about the fatal similarities and prosaic purpose of woman, but he had never denied (being by no means lacking in observation) that men, at times, were intensely personal in their selection; and whether this were due to a sudden alliance between the generative cells and the unconscious, or eugenic suggestion, or fetishes, or propinquity, or a pretty face, or a restless longing for completion, or whatever, the fact remained that man, sometime during his life, unless thymo-centric, wanted one woman in particular and moved heaven and earth to get her. Well, he had come to that pass, and by what special set of phenomena induced was a matter of no interest to him. He wished that codes had never been invented. Certainly that he had met Gita Carteret before he had known Eustace Bylant. He had suffered torments enough during that winter in New York. Gita and Eustace in that narrow house! Companions, friends, almost intimates. How could the man fail to win her? He began with everything in his favor, and if a man could not convert a friend into a lover when he lived under the same roof with her he must be a poor apology for one. And Geoffrey had the highest admiration for Eustace Bylant. He had sometimes gone out at night and stood in front of that narrow house, paralyzed in a sort of nightmare; then fleeing like a man possessed. Once he collided with a policeman and had some trouble explaining himself, for the hour was two and he guessed that his eyes were as wild as his thoughts. But on the night after he extracted the bullet from Bylant’s body he knew that one phase of his torments had been a waste of nerve-energy. Gita could not have been more cruelly indifferent if she had wounded a criminal just out of Sing Sing. And he had received a subtle message from that golden gown and powdered hair. That she had been indulging in an orgy of intimate psychology, his future as well as her own disposed of in rough outline, he was mercifully ignorant, but that the masquerade was in some way connected with himself and the night they had hovered on the verge of an understanding, he knew as well as if she had told him.