From the first Hartley had been led to regard Cordelia as a woman without an affluent sense of humor. Then, after reading The Silver Poppy, he had wondered if she had not drained off, as it were, her vanished reservoirs of mirth; if her mental blitheness had not been lost with the too labored advent of her first-born. He had heard not infrequently of "men of one book." Could it be that Cordelia was a woman of one supreme effort? Or was it her newer life that was so altering and wasting and enervating her? For, hard as he found it to confess to himself, The Unwise Virgins, as a whole, held neither accomplishment nor hope. In fact, with his child terror of the trite and the commonplace, and racked as he was by his "torture of form," he found in it nothing but energy miserably misspent. It was a heap of glittering particles that ran elusively through the fingers, a labored thing of shreds and patches. Its simulation of power was almost pedantry, its affectation of _finesse_ was time and time again flaccid idling with words half understood. Each time the wings of his admiration were about to unfold, the stroke of some little banality sent him tumbling down to earth again. Yet through the maze of all this energy misdirected he could get glimpses of the substantial enough central idea on which Cordelia had attempted to build. But on it she had built nothing but a misshapen, chaotic thing which tempted him, with his passion for form, to demolish and rebuild after his own fashion. It stood a challenge to him. Not that Hartley looked on himself as a master workman in this respect. He could not pride himself on either great experience or great accomplishment. But the enthusiasm of the true disciple was in him; a youth of isolation had been building in him those silent fires which smelt experience and mood into art and expression. He had been a desultory yet rapacious reader. Through an erratic and none too studious college course he had fed hungrily on the older literature of his own tongue, and had also mastered the poets of a tongue which he could never force himself to look on as dead. He had come out of these excursions with a sensitized taste and the gift of a sort of literary bletonism, intuitively responding to any sign of the artist beyond the effort. And now, with the touch refined and the hand trained, he, as an artist, stood idle, pounding the anvil of journalism when he might be wielding the chisel of the gold-smith.