“I don’t want to talk to myself,” she murmured, and glanced over her shoulder.

A man has need of his fellows for a shield.  Man is man’s shelter from all the storm of unanswered questions.  Where am I?  What am I?  Why am I?—­No reply.  No reassuring double to take away the ghost-sense of self, that unseen, intangible aura of personality in which each of us moves as in a cloud.  In the souls of some there is an ever-present Man God who will forever save them from this supreme experience.  Sheila’s religion, vague, conventional, childish, faltered away from her soul.  Except for her fire, which had a sort of sympathy of life and warmth and motion, she was unutterably alone.  And she was beginning to suffer from the second misery of solitude—­a sense of being many personalities instead of one.  She seemed to be entertaining a little crowd of confused and argumentative Sheilas.  To silence them she fixed her mind on her immediate problem.

She tried to draw Hilliard close to her heart.  She had an honest hunger for his warm and graceful beauty, for his young strength, but this natural hunger continually shocked her.  She tried not to remember the smoothness of his neck as her half-conscious hands had slipped away from it that afternoon when he raised her from the snow.  It seemed to her that her desire for him was centered somewhere in her body.  Her mind remained cool, detached, critical, even hostile.  She disliked the manner of his wooing—­not that there should have been any insult to the pride of a nameless little adventurer, Hudson’s barmaid, a waif, in being told that she was a “good girl” and fit to be the mother of this young man’s children.  But Sheila knew instinctively that these things could not be said, could not even be thought of by such a man as Marcus Arundel.  She remembered his words about her mother....  Sheila wanted with a great longing to be loved like that, to be so spoken of, so exquisitely entreated.  A phrase in Hudson’s letter came to her mind, “I handled you in my heart like a flower” ...  Unconsciously she pressed her hand against her lips, remembered the taste of whiskey and of blood.  If only it had been Dickie’s lips that had first touched her own.  Blinding tears fell.  The memory of Dickie’s comfort, of Dickie’s tremulous restraint, had a strange poignancy....  Why was he so different from all the rest?  So much more like her father?  What was there in this pale little hotel clerk who drank too much that lifted him out and up into a sort of radiance?  Her memory of Dickie was always white—­the whiteness of that moonlight of their first, of that dawn of their last, meeting.  He had had no chance in his short, unhappy, and restricted life—­not half the chance that young Hilliard’s life had given him—­to learn such delicate appreciations, such tenderness, such reserves.  Where had he got his delightful, gentle whimsicalities, that sweet, impersonal detachment that refused to yield to stupid angers and disgusts?  He was like—­in