Cairns’ experience with women was not nearly so large as it looked.  He had known many women, but impersonally.  He was late to mature, and all his younger energies were used for what he had believed to be the world’s work, but what he now perceived were the activities of a vain, ego-driven intellect, that delighted to attract the passing eye by the ring of the anvil and a great show of unsleeved muscle.  Much of this early work had kept him afield, and his calls home to New York had inflicted upon him the fatal stimulus for quantity.  His still earlier years were passed in a home where a placid mother reigned, and a large family of sisters served.  He, therefore, met the world’s women without that mighty tang of novelty which features the young manhood of the unsistered.

He had undergone his mannish period of treason to women generally.  These were the days when he believed in using force—­punishing with words—­“punch,” he called it.  This is a mental indelicacy which the ordinary man seldom outgrows.  His crowning fact is that dynamite will loosen stumps and break rock.  Therefore, all that is not dynamite is not proper man-stuff.  Woman, to this sort, is something between “an angel and an idiot.”  She must be guarded from herself in all that has to do with thought and performance.  As panderer and caterer, she emphatically belongs.  Young men grasp this.  If they reach middle age with it, only an angel can roll the stone away.

Cairns now realized he had been near to missing one of the greatest moments that come into the life of man.  What chance has the ordinary male—­half-grown, except physically—­of ever glowing with real chivalry?  To him women are easy, common, plentiful, without mystery or lofty radiance.  How can the valor of humility brighten his quest?  How can he be a lover—­who does not realize his poverty, his evil, the vastness of his need?  What does it mean to the mere male, this highest of earthly gifts, the glance from a woman which ends his quest of her, the gift of herself?  To be great and a man, and a lover, he must reach that point of declaration which holds:  Without her, I am an outcast; with her I can alter worlds! A transcendent moment of conquest is the winning of a woman, to such a spirit....

A frightful void stretches between mere man and reality....  Mere man must be baptized in spirit to feel the anguish that is woman’s, to give her real treasures to some male.  Which are the greater artists and producers, the saviors of the race?  Those heroines who survive the heart-break of man’s indelicacy, and manage alone to give their treasures to their children.  The art of such women lives, indeed.  David Cairns was coming along.

The work that Andrew Bedient began in the Cairns mind and heart was being finished by Vina Nettleton.  In great thirst of soul, he had come to her and been restored.  He was very eager to leave all he had in the shelter of the palms.