That Mary Davis was the lady of her husband’s one romance, she had no longer any doubt.  Anyone, that is, any man, might love deeply and hopelessly a woman of such rare and subtle charm.  Possessing youth in glorious measure herself, Desire naturally discounted her rival’s lack of it.  With her, the slight blurring of Mary’s carefully tended “lines,” the tired look around her eyes, the somewhat cold-creamy texture of her delicate skin, weighed nothing against the exquisite finish and fine sophistication which had been the gift of the added years.

In age, she thought, Mary and Benis would rank each other.  They were also essentially of the same world.  Neither had ever gazed through windows.  Both had been free of life from its beginning.  Love between them might well have been a fitting progression.

The one fact which did not fit in here was this—­in the story as told by Benis the affair had been one of unreciprocated affection.  This presupposed a blindness on the lady’s part which Desire began increasingly to doubt.  She had already reached the point when it seemed impossible that anyone should not admire what to her was entirely admirable.  Even the explanation of a prior attachment (the “Someone Else” of the professor’s story), did not carry conviction.  Who else could there be—­compared with Benis?

No.  It looked, upon the face of it, as if there had been a mistake somewhere.  Benis had despaired too soon!

This fateful thought had been crouching at the door of Desire’s mind ever since Mary had ceased to be an abstraction.  She had kept it out.  She had refused to know that it was there.  She had been happy in spite of it.  But now, when its time was fully come, it made small work of her frail barriers.  It blundered in, leering and triumphant.

Men have been mistaken before now.  Men have turned aside in the very moment of victory.  And Benis Spence was not a man who would beg or importune.  How easily he might have taken for refusal what was, in effect, mere withdrawal.  Had Mary retreated only that he might pursue?  And had the Someone Else been No One Else at all?

If this were so, and it seemed at least possible, the retreating lady had been smartly punished.  Serve her right—­oh, serve her right a thousand times for having dared to trifle!  Desire wasted no pity on her.  But what of him?  With merciless lucidity Desire’s busy brain created the missing acts which might have brought the professor’s tragedy of errors to a happy ending.  It would have been so simple—­ if Benis had only waited.  Even pursuit would not have been required of him.  Mary, unpursued, would have come back; unasked, she might have offered.  But Benis had not waited.

Desire saw all this in the time that it took her to go down-stairs.  At the bottom of the stairs she faced its unescapable logic:  if he were free now, he might be happy yet.