In the amplitude of his wanderings, one conception had grown slightly out of proportion.  He saw this now, and smiled affectionately at the old thought:  “When The Woman appears, I shall not be alone in the gladness of the moment."...  Those were mountain-tops of dreaming upon which he strode without reckoning.  It would have been absurd, had Beth Truba given him a sign.  This was not India, nor the Dream Ranges....  She had faced life, lived it among the teeming elements of this vast city.  The world had wrought upon her, while she wrought her place in the world.  She was finished, an artist, a woman of New York, wise, poised, brilliant.  It was the world’s ideals, and not those of the silence and the spirit, altogether, that governed her manner and dress and movement.  She had not lived in the silence; therefore that which was of the silence had been kept among the deep inner places of her life.  The secrets of her heart were deeper than mere man’s leaden fathomings.  Even had he appeared unto her as an illumination—­only Beth Truba would have known.

He did not come into great peace in her presence.  No matter what she dreamed of, or desired, the lover could only come to her in the world’s approved ways.  So, all the accumulated beauty of idealism counted nothing in this first stage of Bedient’s quest.  Instead of the peace of her presence, he was filled with restless energies, past all precedent.  Quite in a boyish way, he wanted to do things for her, huge and little things, forgetting not the least, and performing each succeeding action with a finer art.

Beth Truba was the first woman who ever appealed to Bedient, without recalling in some way the Adelaide passion.  There was hardly a trace of that element in the new outpouring.  If it is true that a woman calls from man a love-token in her own image, Beth Truba was marble cold.  The larger part of his first giving was above the flesh, a passion to bestow beautiful things, the happiness of others.  That she might ever have any meaning to him beyond receiving these gifts, scarcely entered, as yet, his thrilled consciousness.  It had startled him that she was seemingly free; that she had reached full womanhood in solitary empire.  He dared be glad of this, but he could not grasp it, unless she were vowed to spinsterhood by some irrevocable iron of her will; or perhaps some king of men had come, and she had given her word....  Bedient could not understand how any discerning masculine mind could look upon Beth Truba, and go his way without determining his chance.  He felt (and here he was “warm,” as they say in the children’s game) that David Cairns must be one of the men who had seen Beth Truba and not conquered.  Perhaps Cairns would tell him regarding these things, but they were altogether too sacred to broach, except in the finest possible moment.

He had returned to the club early in the afternoon, and was standing at one of the windows, his eyes turned toward the green square opposite.  He was thinking of the enchantress, and how she would admire the shower-whipped hills of Equatoria and all that wild perfumed beauty....  His name was softly spoken by one of the regal shadows of the night before, Marguerite Grey.