She expected what any woman alive might have expected save the chosen few who have the great gift of reading the souls of the poet and the visionary; and Clem Sypher, in his way, was both.  She braced her nerves to hear the expected.  But the poet and the visionary spoke.

It was the old story of the Cure, his divine mission to spread the healing unguent over the suffering earth.  Voices had come to him as they had come to the girl at Domremy, and they had told him that through Zora Middlemist, and no other, was his life’s mission to be accomplished.

To her it was anticlimax.  Reaction forced a laugh against her will.  She leaned back among the sofa cushions.

“Is that all?” she said, and Sypher did not catch the significance of the words.  “You seem to forget that the role of Mascotte is not a particularly active one.  It’s all very well for you, but I have to sit at home and twirl my thumbs.  Have you ever tried that by way of soul-satisfying occupation?  Don’t you think you’re just a bit—­egotistical?”

He relaxed the tension of his attitude with a sigh, thrust his hands into his pockets and sat down.

“I suppose I am.  When a man wants something with all the strength of his being and thinks of nothing else day or night, he develops a colossal selfishness.  It’s a form of madness, I suppose.  There was a man called Bernard Palissy who had it, and made everybody sacrifice themselves to his idea.  I’ve no right to ask you to sacrifice yourself to mine.”

“You have the right of friendship,” said Zora, “to claim my interest in your hopes and fears, and that I’ve given you and shall always give you.  But beyond that, as you say, you have no right.”

He rose, with a laugh.  “I know.  It’s as logical as a proposition of Euclid.  But all the same I feel I have a higher right, beyond any logic.  There are all kinds of phenomena in life which have nothing whatsoever to do with reason.  You have convinced my reason that I’m an egotistical dreamer.  But nothing you can do or say will ever remove the craving for you that I have here “—­and he thumped his big chest—­“like hunger.”

When he had gone Zora thought over the scene with more disturbance of mind than she appreciated.  She laughed to herself at Sypher’s fantastic claim.  To give up the great things of the world, Life itself, for the sake of a quack ointment!  It was preposterous.  Sypher was as crazy as Septimus; perhaps crazier, for the latter did not thump his chest and inform her that his guns or his patent convertible bed-razor-strop had need of her “here.”  Decidedly, the results of her first excursion into the big world had not turned out satisfactorily.  Her delicate nose sniffed at them in disdain.  The sniff, however, was disappointingly unconvincing.  The voices of contemptible people could not sound in a woman’s ears like the drowsy murmuring of waters.  The insane little devil that had visited her in Clem Sypher’s garden whispered her to stay.