First, and above all, Vance Corliss was drawn to Frona Welse because of the clamor within him for a return to the soil.  In him the elements were so mixed that it was impossible for women many times removed to find favor in his eyes.  Such he had met constantly, but not one had ever drawn from him a superfluous heart-beat.  Though there had been in him a growing instinctive knowledge of lack of unity,—­the lack of unity which must precede, always, the love of man and woman,—­not one of the daughters of Eve he had met had flashed irresistibly in to fill the void.  Elective affinity, sexual affinity, or whatsoever the intangible essence known as love is, had never been manifest.  When he met Frona it had at once sprung, full-fledged, into existence.  But he quite misunderstood it, took it for a mere attraction towards the new and unaccustomed.

Many men, possessed of birth and breeding, have yielded to this clamor for return.  And giving the apparent lie to their own sanity and moral stability, many such men have married peasant girls or barmaids, And those to whom evil apportioned itself have been prone to distrust the impulse they obeyed, forgetting that nature makes or mars the individual for the sake, always, of the type.  For in every such case of return, the impulse was sound,—­only that time and space interfered, and propinquity determined whether the object of choice should be bar-maid or peasant girl.

Happily for Vance Corliss, time and space were propitious, and in Frona he found the culture he could not do without, and the clean sharp tang of the earth he needed.  In so far as her education and culture went, she was an astonishment.  He had met the scientifically smattered young woman before, but Frona had something more than smattering.  Further, she gave new life to old facts, and her interpretations of common things were coherent and vigorous and new.  Though his acquired conservatism was alarmed and cried danger, he could not remain cold to the charm of her philosophizing, while her scholarly attainments were fully redeemed by her enthusiasm.  Though he could not agree with much that she passionately held, he yet recognized that the passion of sincerity and enthusiasm was good.

But her chief fault, in his eyes, was her unconventionality.  Woman was something so inexpressibly sacred to him, that he could not bear to see any good woman venturing where the footing was precarious.  Whatever good woman thus ventured, overstepping the metes and bounds of sex and status, he deemed did so of wantonness.  And wantonness of such order was akin to—­well, he could not say it when thinking of Frona, though she hurt him often by her unwise acts.  However, he only felt such hurts when away from her.  When with her, looking into her eyes which always looked back, or at greeting and parting pressing her hand which always pressed honestly, it seemed certain that there was in her nothing but goodness and truth.