Just as I could look into the glass and see a face young, haggard, handsome, if I may use the word without vanity, that seemed not to be mine, so I could look into my heart and read the suffering of which I no longer perceived the causes. It was like looking at the scar of a wound received before you can remember. Your body must have bled from it, your nerves must have ached; even now it is numb or sensitive; but its history is lost to you. It was once the outstanding fact of your childish existence; and now all of which you are aware is something atrophied, lacking, or that shrinks at a touch. In just that way I knew that passion had once flashed through my life, but had left me nothing but the memory of a memory. I could trace its path almost as easily as you can follow the track of a tornado through a town—by the wreckage. I mean by the wreckage an emotional weariness, an emotional distress, an emotional distaste for emotion; but above everything else I mean a craving to begin the emotion all over again. I often wondered if some passional experience hadn’t caused the shattering of the brain cells. I often wondered if the woman I had loved was not dead. I wondered if I might not even have killed her. Was that the crime from which I was running away? Were the Furies pursuing me? Was it to be my punishment to fall in love with another woman and suffer the second time because the first suffering had defeated its own ends in making me insensible? All through the evening thoughts of this kind, now and then with a half-feverish turn, ran through my mind, till by the time I went to bed love no longer seemed impossible. It was appalling; and yet it had a fascination. So for the next few days I walked with a vision pure, unobtrusive, subdued, holy in its way, which nevertheless broke into light and passion and flame that nobody but myself was probably aware of. I also gleaned from Lydia Blair, who had a journalistic facility in gathering personal facts, that Mildred Averill’s place in New York life was not equal to her opportunities. "There are always girls like that," Miss Blair commented. "They’ve got all the chances in the world, and don’t know how to make use of them. She’s not a bad looker, not when you come to study her; and yet you couldn’t show her off with the dressiest models in New York." I ventured to suggest that showing off might not be Miss Averill’s ambition.