Beth would not trust the Shadowy Sister, but was determined to judge Bedient according to world standards.  Plainly she attracted him, but could not be sure that her attraction was unique, though she always remembered that he had told of his mother only to her.  He had a different mood, a different voice almost, for each of the other women of their acquaintance.  His liking for the Grey One mystified Beth; Vina Nettleton had charmed him, brought forth in a single afternoon many intimate things from his depths.  He spoke pleasantly of Mrs. Wordling.

The Shadowy Sister was bewitched.  To her a great lover had come—­a lover who had added to a boy’s delicacy and beauty of ideal, a man’s certainty and power.  This was the trusting, visionary part of Beth, that had not entered at all into the other romance.  Beth refused now to be ruled by it.  The world had hurt her.  The fault was not hers, but the world’s.  The only profit she could see to be drawn from her miseries of the past was to use her head to prevent repetition.  Hearts were condemned.

And yet, the contrasting conduct of the Shadowy Sister in this and that other romance, was one of the most astonishing things in Beth’s experience. (Sailor-man had but to enter and speak, for Shadowy Sister to appear in kneeling adoration.)

Often Bedient was allowed to stay while she worked at other things.  His own portrait prospered slowly, a fact in which the world might have found humor.  And often they talked together long after the slanting light had made work impossible; their faces altered in the dim place; their voices low....  There were moments when the woman’s heart stirred to break its silence; when the man before her seemed bravely a man, and the confines of his nature to hold magnificent distances.  If she could creep within those confines, would it not mean truly to live?...  But the years would sweep through her mind—­grim, gray, implacable chariots—­and in their dusty train, the specific memories of fleshly limitation and untruth.  To survive, she had been forced to lock her heart; to hold every hope in the cold white fingers of fear; cruelly to curb the sweep of feminine outpouring, lest its object soften into chaos; and roused womanhood, returning empty—­overwhelm.  This is the sorriest instinct of self-preservation.

She would have said at this time that Andrew Bedient had not aroused the woman in her as the Other had done.  Indeed, she paled at the thought that the Other had exhausted a trifle, her great force of heart-giving.  There had been beauty in such a bestowal—­pain and passion—­but beauty, too....  Another strange circumstance:  Bedient had made her think of the Other so differently.  She had half put away her pride; she might have been too insistent for her rights.  The Other really had improved miraculously from the poor boy who had come to their house.  And to the artist’s eye, he was commandingly masculine, a veritable ideal....  Bedient was different every day.