The afternoon sunshine streamed through the dull gold curtains into the old print shop where Corinna sat in her tapestry-covered chair between the tea-table and the log fire.  She was alone for the moment; and lying back in the warmth and fragrance of the room, she let her gaze rest lovingly on one of the English mezzotints over which a stray sunbeam quivered.  The flames made a pleasant whispering sound over the cedar logs; her favourite wide-open creamy roses with golden hearts scented the air; and the delicate China tea in her cup was drawn to perfection.  As she lay back in the big chair but one thing disturbed her serenity—­and that one thing was within.  She had everything that she wanted, and for the hour, at least, she was tired of it all.  The mood was transient, she knew.  It would pass because it was alien to the clear bracing air of her mind; but while it lasted she told herself that the present had palled on her because she had looked beneath the vivid surface of illusion to the bare structure of life.  Men had ceased to interest her because she knew them too well.  She knew by heart the very machinery of their existence, the secret mental springs which moved them so mechanically; and she felt to-day that if they had been watches, she could have taken them apart and put them together again without suspending for a minute the monotonous regularity of their works.  Even Gideon Vetch, who might have held a surprise for her, had differed from the rest in one thing only:  he had not seen that she was beautiful!  And it wasn’t that she was breaking.  To-day because of her mood of depression, she appeared drooping and faded; but that night, a week ago, in her velvet gown and her pearls, she had looked as handsome as ever.  The truth was simply that Vetch had glanced at her without seeing her, as he might have glanced at the gilded sheaves of wheat on a picture frame.  He had been so profoundly absorbed in his own ideas that she had been nothing more individual than one of an audience.  If he were to meet her in the street he would probably not recognize her.  And this was a man who had never before seen a woman whose beauty had passed into history, a man who had risen to his place through what the Judge had described with charitable euphemism, as “unusual methods.”  “The odd part about Vetch,” the Judge had added meditatively on the drive home, “is that he doesn’t attempt to disguise the kind of thing that we of the old school would call—­well, to say the least—­extraordinary.  He is as outspoken as Mirabeau.  I can’t make it out.  It may be, of course, that he has a better reading of human nature than we have, and that he knows such gestures catch the eye, like long hair or a red necktie.  It is very much as if he said—­’Yes, I’ll steal if I’m driven to it, but—­confound it!—­I won’t lie!’”