Only at night when there were no alien sights or sounds to engage his attention, when not even his art could come between them, and she could draw him into her arms and submerge his restless spirit in the tides of her love did she feel his equal--really worthy of him. These transports which came with the darkness, or with the mellow light of the little oil lamp that hung in chains from the ceiling near their wide bed, or in the faint freshness of dawn with the birds cheeping in the one tree of the little garden below--were to her at once utterly generous and profoundly selfish. She had eagerly absorbed Eugene's philosophy of self-indulgent joy where it concerned themselves--all the more readily as it coincided with her own vague ideas and her own hot impulses. Angela had come to marriage through years of self-denial, years of bitter longing for the marriage that perhaps would never be, and out of those years she had come to the marriage bed with a cumulative and intense passion. Without any knowledge either of the ethics or physiology of sex, except as pertained to her state as a virgin, she was vastly ignorant of marriage itself; the hearsay of girls, the equivocal confessions of newly married women, and the advice of her elder sister (conveyed by Heaven only knows what process of conversation) had left her almost as ignorant as before, and now she explored its mysteries with abandon, convinced that the unrestrained gratification of passion was normal and excellent--in addition to being, as she came to find, a universal solvent for all differences of opinion or temperament that threatened their peace of mind. Beginning with their life in the studio on Washington Square, and continuing with even greater fervor now in Paris, there was what might be described as a prolonged riot of indulgence between them, bearing no relation to any necessity in their natures, and certainly none to the demands which Eugene's intellectual and artistic tasks laid upon him. She was to Eugene astonishing and delightful; and yet perhaps not so much delightful as astonishing. Angela was in a sense elemental, but Eugene was not: he was the artist, in this as in other things, rousing himself to a pitch of appreciation which no strength so undermined by intellectual subtleties could continuously sustain. The excitement of adventure, of intrigue in a sense, of discovering the secrets of feminine personality--these were really what had constituted the charm, if not the compelling urge, of his romances. To conquer was beautiful: but it was in essence an intellectual enterprise. To see his rash dreams come true in the yielding of the last sweetness possessed by the desired woman, had been to him imaginatively as well as physically an irresistible thing. But these enterprises were like thin silver strands spun out across an abyss, whose beauty but not whose dangers were known to him. Still, he rejoiced in this magnificent creature-joy which Angela supplied; it was,