It was in this mood she had come upon the hut and Alexis. Her sleeping self had reawakened and once more taken her into possession. But it was a rested and less inverted self, a younger and more ingenuous self, who still admitted the futility of happiness but dimly craved it. In her present chastened mood she was determined to oust the personal factor. There had been too much of that in all her previous dealings with men. It had always been to that quality of pervasive femininity to which they had succumbed, and consciously or unconsciously, she had never failed to assert it. She was going to change all that. Here was a boy, probably ten years her junior, whose plight would arouse the sympathy of the veriest egotist. Whose unhappiness, combined with his genius, stirred the stagnant pool of her soul. Her quickened spirit responded to his need with almost complete self-forgetfulness. That genius should come to her door in the guise of a postulant, just as she herself had become resigned to her own lack of it, seemed the culminating miracle to her new-found peace of mind. To heal this bruised spirit and send it back to the world in the glory of renewed splendor was her job. And nothing less than success would satisfy her. For once she would step out of the amateur class and prove that she could do one thing thoroughly and well, even if it were so infinitesimal a thing as the rescue of a soul. CHAPTER IV THE PAWN It was one of those crystal October days, when the air is crisp and clean, tempered by a kindly sun and Central Park is etched in russet and gold against a sky of opalescent clouds. Huddled against the cushions of a high window seat, Claire gazed down upon it all from the eleventh story of the huge apartment building in 59th Street where she and Mme. Petrovskey had been installed for the last year. It was the customary, rather sumptuous, decidedly characteristic studio apartment which they had been in the habit of occupying for the last five or six years, ever since Alexis had commenced to be known. Walnut paneling, canopied bed, old blue brocade covers and hangings, reeked of the interior decorator; the only personal touches which had survived Claire's listlessness being a carved ivory rosary hanging over the bedpost, a few French and Italian novels of the emotional school, and a large photograph of Alexis which scowled out upon the world from the dressing table.