Overman had appeared on the scene of Kate's life in a peculiar crisis. Married two years, she had passed through the period of love's ecstacy which woman finds first in self-surrender. She had just reached the point of sex growth when a revolt against man's dominion became inevitable. This mood of revolt was made stronger by Gordon's fret over her social gatherings. In the dim light of the pulpit, preaching with mystic elation, he had seemed to her a god. Now, in the full blaze of physical possession, the divine glow had paled about his brow. She had found him only a man, self-conscious, egotistic and domineering. He had many personal habits she did not like. He was overfastidious in his dress, and critical and fussy about her lack of order in housekeeping. He was finicky about his food. He hated tea, declaring the odour made him sick. She felt this a covert thrust at her five-o'clocks. To his criticisms she at last coolly replied: "I claim the perfect freedom you preach. I will do as I please. You can do the same." He laughed in a weak sort of way and declared he liked her independence. At this moment of reaction, satiety, and the beginning of friction he had introduced her to Overman. His candour, his brutal realism, his defiance and scorn for poetic theories, presented to her the sharp contrast which made him doubly fascinating. Just at the moment Gordon was growing peevishly dogmatic in the reiteration of his ideals, she had suffered a physical disillusioning and begun to tire of poetry. The sheer brute power of the other man, the incarnation of the thing that is, with a cynic's contempt for dreams and dreamers, had given voice to her own rebellion and drawn her resistlessly. The boyish tenderness underlying Overman's nature, which she discovered later, had made his ugliness and brute strength added charms. He had a pathetic way of looking at her with a doglike worship, as though conscious of his defects, which pleased and nattered her own sense of the perfection of beauty. They were seated in his box at the Metropolitan Opera House while Gordon was at the farewell banquet to his foreign delegates. "I feel," he said, bitterly, "every time I see this play of 'Faust,' and hear Edouard De Reszke's deep bass speak for His Majesty the Devil, that His Majesty really made this world. I'd know it but for the paradox of such divine perfection before my eyes in the living reality of a woman like you." His voice throbbed with earnestness. "I'm growing to love the world. It's a beautiful old place," she answered, with a lazy smile. "Well, it's the only one I'm likely to travel in, so I'm going to make the best of it, work with its mighty forces, dare and defy the fools who cross my purposes. If the future has for me only pain, I'll not complain. I'll grin and bear it, but I'll confess to you I get a little lonely sometimes." Her eyes lifted with surprise. "I never heard you admit that before."