sure to find himself among his old shoes in the dark.  The pull of that aperture was stronger than his will,—­and he had always considered his will the strongest thing about him.  When she threw herself upon the divan and lay resting, he still stared, holding his breath.  His nerves were so on edge that a sudden noise made him start and brought out the sweat on his forehead.  The dog would come and tug at his sleeve, knowing that something was wrong with his master.  If he attempted a mournful whine, those strong hands closed about his throat.

When Hedger came slinking out of his closet, he sat down on the edge of the couch, sat for hours without moving.  He was not painting at all now.  This thing, whatever it was, drank him up as ideas had sometimes done, and he sank into a stupor of idleness as deep and dark as the stupor of work.  He could not understand it; he was no boy, he had worked from models for years, and a woman’s body was no mystery to him.  Yet now he did nothing but sit and think about one.  He slept very little, and with the first light of morning he awoke as completely possessed by this woman as if he had been with her all the night before.  The unconscious operations of life went on in him only to perpetuate this excitement.  His brain held but one image now—­vibrated, burned with it.  It was a heathenish feeling; without friendliness, almost without tenderness.

Women had come and gone in Hedger’s life.  Not having had a mother to begin with, his relations with them, whether amorous or friendly, had been casual.  He got on well with janitresses and wash-women, with Indians and with the peasant women of foreign countries.  He had friends among the silk-skirt factory girls who came to eat their lunch in Washington Square, and he sometimes took a model for a day in the country.  He felt an unreasoning antipathy toward the well-dressed women he saw coming out of big shops, or driving in the Park.  If, on his way to the Art Museum, he noticed a pretty girl standing on the steps of one of the houses on upper Fifth Avenue, he frowned at her and went by with his shoulders hunched up as if he were cold.  He had never known such girls, or heard them talk, or seen the inside of the houses in which they lived; but he believed them all to be artificial and, in an aesthetic sense, perverted.  He saw them enslaved by desire of merchandise and manufactured articles, effective only in making life complicated and insincere and in embroidering it with ugly and meaningless trivialities.  They were enough, he thought, to make one almost forget woman as she existed in art, in thought, and in the universe.