The reason why so many men try to climb Mount Everest is because they cannot do it. Let even one reach the summit, and that exalted peak has fallen into the hands of the tame geographers and scientists. It becomes a business then, not an adventure, to chart those terrific altitudes. For the same reason the most attractive woman to men is the unattainable woman. Shippen found Mrs. Cutter attractive. He did not analyze the reason why. It was not her beauty. He had had success with far more beautiful women. He doubted his success here. Heavens! To find a woman who could not be won! What an adventure. That steady, unrevealing gaze in her blue eyes--what did it conceal? What did she know? He doubted if she knew anything. That was it; she was something real, not built up out of little knowledges, little virtues, spiced with little vices, and finished like her furniture with the varnish of feminine charms. What a noble change from the skittish kittens and the secret viragoes and the mercenary starlings he had known. It is astonishing what terrible things a man can be thinking, while he looks at you frankly and laughs honestly and takes your food like a brother. Certainly Cutter would have been astonished if he had known what was passing through the mind of his guest as they talked and laughed together at this table. But it is a question if Helen would have been moved. She did not know this man, but she felt him like a darkness, in no way personal to her, but there, with George frisking around like an ambitious spark in this blackness. She was thinking of George chiefly, interpreting him according to Shippen. It was a fearful experience, and no one suspected her pain, because a woman can dig her own grave and step down into it behind the look and the smile and the duty she gives you, and it may be years before you discover that she is gone. All this is put in for the emotional reader who knows it is the truth, and has probably felt the sod above herself, even while she is sadly dressing beautifully for an evening’s pleasure with a husband who has slain her or a lover whose perfidy has brought on these private obsequies. But all such truth is unhealthy, like the failure of courage in invalids. And in this particular I warn you that the fate of Helen differs from your own. She died a few times, as the most valorous women do; but she had a sublime instinct for surviving these incidental passings.