A little later, when he came to know her, he found that the vision she looked upon had coloured not only her own soul, but even the outward daily happenings of her life. For him she was from the first compacted of divine mysteries, of exquisite surprises, and he loved to fancy that he could see her genius burning like a clear flame within her and shining at vivid moments with a still soft radiance in her face. He always thought of her soul as of something luminous, and there were instants when it seemed to touch her eyes and her mouth with an edge of light. Beyond this her complexities remained for him as on the day when he first saw her--if she was obscure it was the obscurity of a star seen through a fog--and the desire to understand lost itself presently in the bewilderment of his misapprehension. At last, however, he had put her, as it were, tentatively aside, had relinquished his attempt to reduce her to a formula with the despairing admission that she was, take her as you would, a subtlety that compelled one to a mental effort. The effort which he had up to this time associated with the society of women had been of anything but a mental character. There was the effort of putting one's best physical foot in advance, the effort of keeping one's person conspicuously in evidence and one's intellect as unobtrusively in abeyance--the material effort of appearing always in one's best trousers, the moral effort of presenting always one's worst intelligence. It had seemed to him until he met Laura--and his opinion was the effect of a limited experience upon a large philosophic ignorance--that the female sex played the part in Nature which is performed by the chorus in a Greek tragedy--that it shrilly voiced the horrors of the actual in the face of a divine indifference--and strenuously insisted upon the importance of the eternal detail. From Connie he had gathered that the feminine mind tended naturally toward a material philosophy--toward a deification of the body, a faith in the fugitive allurement of the senses, and because of his earlier initiation he had taken Laura's intellectual radiance as the shining of a virtually disembodied spirit. His own senses had led him, he recognised now, to disastrous issues; his love for Connie had been the prompting of mere physical impulse, and he had emerged from it with a feeling of escaping into freedom. Too much Nature he had learned during those months of mental apathy is in its way quite as destructive as too little--there must be a soul in desire to keep it alive, he understood at last, or the perishing body of it will decay for lack of a vital flame in the very hour of its fulfilment. A colder man might have come to such knowledge along impersonal paths, a coarser one would never have gone beyond it, but in Adams the old fighting spirit--a survival of the uncompromising Puritan conscience--had brought him up again, soul and body, to struggle afresh for a cleaner and a sharper air.