But this vicarious relation had now passed into a relation of her own.  Cliffe was to Kitty a problem—­and a problem which, beyond a certain point, defied her.  The element of sex, of course, entered in, but only as intensifying the contrasts and mysteries of imagination.  And he made her feel these contrasts and mysteries as she had never yet felt them; and so he enlarged the world for her, he plunged her, if only by contact with his own bitter and irritable genius, into new regions of sentiment and feeling.  For in spite of the vulgar elements in him there were also elements of genius.  The man was a poet and a thinker, though he were at the same time, in some sense, an adventurer.  His mind was stored with eloquent and beautiful imagery, the poetry of others, and poetry of his own.  He could pursue the meanest personal objects in an unscrupulous way; but he had none the less passed through a wealth of tragic circumstance; he had been face to face with his own soul in the wilds of the earth; he had met every sort of physical danger with contempt; and his arrogant, imperious temper was of the kind which attracts many women, especially, perhaps, women physically small and intellectually fearless, like Kitty, who feel in it a challenge to their power and their charm.

His society, then, had in these six weeks become, for Kitty, a passion—­a passion of the imagination.  For the man himself, she would probably have said that she felt more repulsion than anything else.  But it was a repulsion that held her, because of the constant sense of reaction, of on-rushing life, which it excited in herself.

Add to these the elements of mischief and defiance in the situation, the snatching him from Mary, her enemy and slanderer, the defiance of Lady Grosville and all other hypocritical tyrants, the pride of dragging at her chariot wheels a man whom most people courted even when they loathed him, who enjoyed, moreover, an astonishing reputation abroad, especially in that France which Kitty adored, as a kind of modern Byron, the only Englishman who could still display in public the “pageant of a bleeding heart,” without making himself ridiculous, and perhaps enough has been heaped together to explain the infatuation that now, like a wild spring gust on a shining lake, was threatening to bring Kitty’s light bark into dangerous waters.

“I don’t care for him,” she said to herself, as she sat thinking alone, “but I must see him—­I will!  And I will talk to him as I please, and where I please!”

Her small frame stiffened under the obstinacy of her resolution.  Kitty’s will at a moment of this kind was a fatality—­so strong was it, and so irrational.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, down-stairs, Ashe himself was wrestling with another phase of the same situation.  Lady Tranmore’s note had said:  “I shall be with you almost immediately after you receive this, as I want to catch you before you go to the Foreign Office.”