It was for Cordelia, perhaps, the penalty of eminence. For little as she had ever shown any sign of sacrificing her artistic aspirations in the rose-grown temple of matrimony, the hunger of the unmated and maturing animal, the wavering passion that arises at times involuntarily in the breast of the coldest priestess amid her coldest marbles, quiescent, but quiescent only as a tiger sleeping in its noonday cave, was now not unknown to the heart of Cordelia Vaughan. She wanted to be loved; but above all things, she wanted to love. The cry of ripe womanhood for its mate awoke at times, but only of late, she knew, with an intensity that was sadly disturbing. Through her girlhood, she remembered, she had often said with a great air that she could never love. To love other than uprightly was even more impossible--yet she had secretly tired of the hollow part of an Aspasia without a Pericles. She had often tried to convince herself that she was too happily neutral, too indeterminate of temperament, to stray from the lonely heights to which she had so painfully climbed for the mere passing glint of a bubble. Now, for at least once in her life, half weary of all her comfortless basking at the too fierce fireside of her early fame she was beginning to ask more and more passionately for some touch of the mellow sun of actual affection, for some gentle warmth of disinterested tenderness. For with all her activity and with all the attention she seemed to receive, Cordelia's life was still a desolately lonely one. An early girlish pose of protesting a fear of men had crystallized into a habit of evading them, except in not infrequent cases of late where they stepped before her as instruments of literary destiny. Good men, she had once said, are like good roads: made for walking over. As the belle of her little Kentucky town she had held herself proudly above each and all of her young suitors. As the successful author of a great book, as the woman of wit and reason, she had tended to repel that attention at the hand of the admiring male which such charm in woman as she might lay claim to invariably called for. She had known many courtships, though, in her own way. Yet she asked herself if she had ever known one absolute and unselfish love. It was Mrs. Spaulding's lightly put question that drove her into a dreary retrospect of a youth she seldom cared to look back on. But was this love now coming to her on belated wings?