She followed him a little way along the Terrace, with eyes growing dim with tears she could not account for. She went back to the drawing-room and threw herself into the arm-chair where he had sat, and made her headache worse by thinking of all her unhappiness. The great room was filling with dusk, and in the twilight pictures gathered and dissolved. What girlish dreams and revolts had gone to make that unfortunate book, which, after endless boomerang-like returns from the publishers, had appeared--only to be denounced by Jewry, ignored by its journals, and scantily noticed by outside criticism. _Mordecai Josephs_ had fallen almost still-born from the press; the sweet secret she had hoped to tell her patroness had turned bitter, like that other secret of her dead love for Sidney, in the reaction from which she had written most of her book. How fortunate, at least, that her love had flickered out--had proved but the ephemeral sentiment of a romantic girl for the first brilliant man she had met. Sidney had fascinated her by his verbal audacities in a world of narrow conventions; he had for the moment laughed away spiritual aspirations and yearnings with a raillery that was almost like ozone to a young woman avid of martyrdom for the happiness of the world. How, indeed, could she have expected the handsome young artist to feel the magic that hovered about her talks with him, to know the thrill that lay in the formal hand-clasp, to be aware that he interpreted for her poems and pictures, and incarnated the undefined ideal of girlish day-dreams? How could he ever have had other than an intellectual thought of her--how could any man, even the religious Raphael, sickly, ugly little thing that she was? She got up and looked in the glass now to see herself thus, but the shadows had gathered too thickly. She snatched up a newspaper that lay on the couch, lit it, and held it before the glass. It flared up threateningly, and she beat it out--laughing hysterically and asking herself if she was mad. But she had seen the ugly little face--its expression frightened her. Yes, love was not for her; she could only love a man of brilliancy and culture, and she was nothing but a Petticoat Lane girl, after all. Its coarseness, its vulgarity, underlay all her veneer. They had got into her book--everybody said so, Raphael said so. How dared she write disdainfully of Raphael's people?--she, an upstart, an outsider!