It was a shock to learn that the possessor of so much beauty, the bearer of so melodious a title, had begun life as Emma Lyon, a servant girl, but, after all, she reflected, the circumstance only created analogies with herself. There were more analogies still. Emma Lyon had been an artist’s model. In an artist’s studio she had made the acquaintance of men of lofty station, just as she herself had met Bob. She had loved and been loved. Romney was perhaps her Hubert Wray. Her career had been exciting and dramatic—the friend of a queen, the more-than-wife of one of the great men of the age. The tragic, miserable death didn’t frighten Jennie, since misery and tragedy always stalked on the edge of her experience. She fell asleep amid vast, vague concepts of queens and heroes beset with loves and problems not unlike Jennie Follett’s. All through the next day she stilled the working of thought by application to _The Egoist_. She took to it as to a drug. In the intervals of her household duties, or whenever her mind became active over her affairs, she ran to her room to begin again, "Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent clashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing." She got little farther, since, for her purpose, this was far enough. She was drugged already, as by dentist’s gas. The more she read the more she felt herself wandering sleepily through realms of dream, where words, as she understood them, had ceased to have significance. So, by sheer force of will, she brought herself to that moment in the afternoon when she stood at the studio door. She hadn’t thought; she hadn’t, in her own phrase, _imagined_. She had allowed herself no instant in which to count the cost or to shrink from paying it. Hubert, love, and the family deliverance from poverty would be hers before nightfall, and she meant not to look beyond. She opened the door softly. Before showing herself, she stopped and listened. There was not a sound. It was often so if Hubert was painting, and the silence only assured her that if he was there, as he probably was, he was waiting for her alone. He was waiting for her alone with that look in his eyes, that maddened animal look which she had seen yesterday, so bestial and yet so compelling! Still more softly she moved forward among the studio odds and ends. Then she saw—and stopped.