McKenna was not without that penetrating imagination that has in it the quality of vision, the power to invoke the figures of the past and to follow an idea into the recesses of the future. All that he had learned and all that he had tentatively surmised of the mysterious purposes of Rita Kildair, returned to him with renewed vividness as he entered the elevator saying briefly to a question: "I’m expected." In his long and profound pursuit of human lawlessness, the detective had formed a crude philosophy, built on the perception of the inequalities of justice. The beginning of all crime, if he could thus have phrased it to himself, was failure. For each man that he had sent to jail for embezzlement, in the capacious corridor of his memory he knew another who ethically was the greater rogue, and, as he had said to Beecher, each day he met one such, looked into his eyes, shook his hands and took his orders. For each woman upon whom public scorn had set the brand of adventuress, he knew another woman who stood enthroned by that same society. Confusedly in his mind he had shaped a crude analysis of life. For him only two classes existed, the strong and the weak. The strong was that brutal race which could not be held down by the restraints of society, who must rise, acquire power, dominate, obeying the natural instinct within them; the weak those who aided them in their upward progress, who served them when they had arrived, and who committed crimes in their names. It was not a moral view of life so much as it was a perception of the persisting law of all animal nature. The engagement to Slade, following so dramatically his triumphant rise from threatened disaster, had made him realize that whatever methods she had dared to employ, Mrs. Kildair was one of those whom society would never scorn for her failure. Intrigued as he was over the details of the theft of the ring, what absorbed him most was the woman. And determined at all hazards to force the defenses of her reserve, he rang the bell. Mrs. Kildair was at the piano, the riotous movements of an Hungarian Czardas filling the apartment. She broke off suddenly, rising as McKenna entered the studio. The mood of whirling ecstasy, suddenly cut off, was still in her flushed cheeks and excited eyes, as she glided rapidly toward him. She was in evening gown, of some flame-colored, filmy material, with sudden trembling flashes of gold bewildering to the eye, provoking to the imagination. The bodice, extreme in its daring, was not one of those stiff cuirasses, in which women encase themselves; rather the effect was of a billowy scarf that had caught and wrapped itself languidly about her. The low throat, the graceful arms, the brilliant row of pointed teeth over the full under lip, all had an extraordinary quality of vibrant, awake, impatient vitality.