Women like to think that the beloved member of their sex plays so filling and absorbing a part in the life of the enslaved man, that all other matters are crowded from his mind. The interests of business dwindle to the vanishing point, the claims of friendship have no place in a heart out of which all else has been pushed. Love, while it lasts, holds him in a spell, and then, if only then, the woman is a reigning goddess. Rion Gracey was not of this order of man. He had loved June since his meeting with her at Foleys, but he had led a life so full of work and business, so preoccupied with a man’s large affairs, that there were periods of weeks when he never thought of her. Yet she had been and was the only woman he had ever truly cared for and ardently desired. Before his meeting with her women had been merely incidents in his onward career. When, during the summer at Foleys, he had come to know her, he had realized how different was the place she would have taken in his life from the transitory interests which were all he had so far known. Then, for the first time, he understood what a genuine passion means to a genuine man. When she had refused to marry him he had left her sore and angry. But the crowded life in which he was so prominent a figure soon filled with vital interests every moment of his days. His wound was not healed, but he forgot its ache. He rigorously pushed the thought of her from his mind. She was not for him, and to think of her was weakness. Then he heard a rumor that Barclay was an admirer of hers, and he shut his mouth and tried harder than ever not to think. But time passed and June did not marry. Jerry, given his freedom, married Mercedes. Rion, a man to whom small gossip was dull, a thing to give no heed to as one walked forward, heard none of the talk of Jerry’s change of heart. It filtered slowly into Virginia, which was across the mountains in another state, and occupied in a big way with big matters. Even Barney Sullivan, who was well primed with San Francisco gossip after Mitty’s return from visits, “down below,” did not mention to his chief anything of Miss Allen and Jerry Barclay. When he heard she was coming to Virginia the love-obsession that the woman likes to believe in, came near taking possession of him. For a day or two he was shaken out of the current of his every-day life and found it hard to attend to his work. The thought of seeing her again filled this self-contained and masterful man with tremors such as a girl might feel at the coming of her lover. The first time he saw her on C Street he found it difficult to collect his thoughts for hours afterward.