"I'd hate to be looking forward to that life of dull foolery," thought she, as the mossy bastions of Besançon drifted from her horizon--she was journeying up alone, Janet staying on with one of the Saint Berthè women as chaperone. "It is foolery and it is dull. I don't see how grown-up people endure it, unless they've never known any better. Yet I seem unable to content myself with the life father stands for--and Dory." She appreciated the meaning of the legend of the creature with the two bodies and the two wills, each always opposed to the other, with the result that all motion was in a dazing circle in which neither wished to go. "Still," she concluded, "I _am_ learning"--which was the truth; indeed, she was learning with astonishing rapidity for a girl who had had such an insidiously wrong start and was getting but slight encouragement. Dory, of course, was helping her, but not as he might. Instead of bringing to bear that most powerful of influences, the influence of passionate love, he held to his stupid compact with his supersensitive self--the compact that he would never intrude his longings upon her. He constantly reminded himself how often woman gives through a sense of duty or through fear of alienating or wounding one she respects and likes; and, so he saw in each impulse to enter Eden boldly a temptation to him to trespass, a temptation to her to mask her real feelings and suffer it. The mystery in which respectable womanhood is kept veiled from the male, has bred in him an awe of the female that she does not fully realize or altogether approve--though she is not slow to advantage herself of it. In the smaller cities and towns of the West, this awe of respectable womanhood exists in a degree difficult for the sophisticated to believe possible, unless they have had experience of it. Dory had never had that familiarity with women which breeds knowledge of their absolute and unmysterious humanness. Thus, not only did he not have the key which enables its possessor to unlock them; he did not even know how to use it when Del offered it to him, all but thrust it into his hand. Poor Dory, indeed--but let only those who have not loved too well to love wisely strut at his expense by pitying him; for, in matters of the heart, sophisticated and unsophisticated act much alike. "Men would dare much more, if they knew what women think," says George Sand. It is also true that the men who dare most, who win most, are those who do not stop to bother about what the women think. Thought does not yet govern the world, but appetite and action--bold appetite and the courage of it. CHAPTER XIX MADELENE