But the scorn was all upon the surface.  Beneath there was fear and respect—­the fear and respect which those demoralized by unearned luxury and by the purposeless life always feel when faced by strength and self-reliance in the crises where externals avail no more than its paint and its bunting a warship in battle.  She knew she had been treating him as no self-respecting man who knew the world would permit any woman to treat him.  She knew her self-respect should have kept her from treating him thus, even if he, in his ignorance of her world and awe of it, would permit.  But more than from shame at vain self-abasement her chagrin came from the sense of having played her game so confidently, so carelessly, so stupidly that he had seen it.  She winced as she recalled how shrewdly and swiftly he had got to the very bottom of her, especially of her selfishness in planning to use him with no thought for his good.  Yet so many women thus used their husbands; why not she?  “I suppose I began too soon....  No, not too soon, but too frigidly.”  The word seemed to her to illuminate the whole situation.  “That’s it!” she cried.  “How stupid of me!”

CHAPTER XXIII

WHAT THE MOON SAW AND DID

Physical condition is no doubt the dominant factor in human thought and action.  State of soul is, as Doctor Schulze has observed, simply the egotistic human vanity for state of body.  If the health of the human race were better, if sickness, the latent and the revealed together, were not all but universal, human relations would be wonderfully softened, sweetened and simplified.  Indigestion, with its various ramifications, is alone responsible for most of the crimes, catastrophes and cruelties, public and private discord; for it tinges human thought and vision with pessimistic black or bloody red or envious green or degenerate yellow instead of the normal, serene and invigorating white.  All the world’s great public disturbers have been diseased.  As for private life, its bad of all degrees could, as to its deep-lying, originating causes, be better diagnosed by physician than by psychologist.

Margaret, being in perfect physical condition, was deeply depressed for only a short time after the immediate cause of her mood ceased to be active.  An hour after Joshua had revealed himself in thunder and lightning, and had gone, she was almost serene again, her hopefulness of healthy youth and her sense of humor in the ascendent.  Their stay in the woods was drawing to an end.  Soon they would be off for Lenox, for her Uncle Dan’s, where there would be many people about and small, perhaps no, opportunity for direct and quick action and result.  She reviewed her conduct and felt that she had no reason to reproach herself for not having made an earlier beginning in what she now saw should have been her tactics with her “wild man.”  How could she, inexpert, foresee what was mockingly