She broke off abruptly.

This confession, with the sudden glimpse it gave him of the fires within her that would not die down, but burned now more fiercely than ever, sent the blood to his head.  His face, his temples, were hot with the fierceness of his joy in his conviction that she had revealed herself to him.  Why she had done so, he could not say. . .  This was the woman whom the world thought composed; who had triumphed over its opposition, compelled it to bow before her; who presented to it that self-possessed, unified personality by which he had been struck at their first meeting.  Yet, paradoxically, the personality remained,—­was more elusive than before.  A thousand revelations, he felt, would not disclose it.

He was no nearer to solving it now. .  Yet the fires burned!  She, too, like himself, was aflame and unsatisfied!  She, too, had tasted success, and had revolted!

“But I don’t get anywhere,” she said wearily.  “At times I feel this ferment, this anger that things are as they are, only to realize what helpless anger it is.  Why not take the world as it appears and live and feel, instead of beating against the currents?”

“But isn’t that inconsistent with what you said awhile ago as to a new civilization?” Hodder asked.

“Oh, that Utopia has no reality for me.  I think it has, at moments, but it fades.  And I don’t pretend to be consistent.  Mr. Bentley lives in a world of his own; I envy him with all my heart, I love and admire him, he cheers and soothes me when I am with him.  But I can’t see—­whatever he sees.  I am only aware of a remorseless universe grinding out its destinies.  We Anglo-Saxons are fond of deceiving ourselves about life, of dressing it up in beautiful colours, of making believe that it actually contains happiness.  All our fiction reflects this—­that is why I never cared to read English or American novels.  The Continental school, the Russians, the Frenchmen, refuse to be deluded.  They are honest.”

“Realism, naturalism,” he mused, recalling a course in philosophy, “one would expect the Russian, in the conditions under which he lives, possessing an artistic temperament combined with a paralysis of the initiative and a sense of fate, to write in that way.  And the Frenchmen, Renan, Zola, and the others who have followed, are equally deterministic, but viewing the human body as a highly organized machine with which we may amuse ourselves by registering its sensations.  These literatures are true in so far as they reflect the characteristics of the nations from which they spring.  That is not to say that the philosophies of which they are the expressions are true.  Nor is it to admit that such a literature is characteristic of the spirit of America, and can be applied without change to our life and atmosphere.  We have yet, I believe, to develop our own literature; which will come gradually as we find ourselves.”

“Find ourselves?” she repeated.