She felt a flame rise near her. It would soon catch her clothes, burn them up. Her it would temper, make mellow. She stood, looking at the flame, this subtle man, who held back his hands and whose eyes were on her. What should she do? Why did he not come forward? He burned straight, there across the room, like a flame in a windless world. Always his hands held back. Her clothes sagged to a dulling weight.... Marcia stood swaying with the need of burning. Would he not help? Then she would help herself. Delicious fool that he was! He was perfume and flame: each pore of her was big with him. Tom watched the firm, still whiteness of her self emerge from the lie of her clothes. No woman. She was a god. She was a pillar of purity and strength. No lascivious rondures and flauntings of flesh, no softnesses. A human form stripped to essential grace. An instrument of living, spare and direct like a command, flaying like a rod, swift like his passion. They loved. They gave no thought to the Shadow--the long intricate life-way of which the passion of woman and man is the mere flaming threshold. Both of them knew this. Each drank, in the other, a secret satisfaction whose mystery and timelessness thrilled them. They did not understand themselves or each other. Their love’s dissidence from the plodding and gluttonous way of husband and wife was a brew sharp, sweet, wild: they were drunk in it together. No more they had in common than their intoxication. Themselves, each other, the nature of their love--all was unknown and secret. They scarce spoke of it. They drank and were glad, and were never content.... Out of the silence of each, they came again. The subtle liquor worked its miracle; they were one into a flame whose leaping walled about them--disappeared as a song stops--leaving them their silences. These carried them off, each to a far deliberate world. No memory, no reason: absence of desire. Until such time as a rising murmur in their separate silences swerved them, flung their silences once more together. All this, merely the spill of Tom’s full life; prelude in hers. His work prospered. Tom had the genius of diligence. He poured himself no more into his affairs downtown than into some unremunerative affair at a friend’s, where the price of applause was exhaustion. With Tom, exhaustion was breathing space till the next passion. So he prospered in work and in play. Laura Duffield was his devoted friend. Gilbert Lomney was his partner. To both, as to Marcia, he was satisfying in the measure that was wise. * * * * * Upon this heyday of his success, David now blundered as a dull boy stumbles over another’s floor-full of tin soldiers.