She tried very hard, sitting there by her wood fire in the orderly
uniform which made her so quaintly young and boyish, to understand the
twisted mental processes that kept him away from her, now that he was
free. And, in the end, she came rather close to the truth: his sense
of failure; his loss of confidence in himself where his love life was
concerned; the strange twisting and warping that were Natalie's sole
legacy from their years together.

For months she had been tending broken bodies and broken spirits. But
the broken pride of a man was a strange and terrible thing.

She did not know where he was stopping, and in the congestion of the
Paris hotels it would be practically impossible to trace him. And there,
too, her own pride stepped in. He must come to her. He knew she cared.
She had been honest with him always, with a sort of terrible honesty.

Surveying the past months she wondered, not for the first time, what had
held them apart so long, against the urge that had become the strongest
thing in life to them both. The strength in her had come from him. She
knew that. But where had Clay got his strength? Men were not like that,
often. Failing final happiness, they so often took what they could get.
Like Chris.

Perhaps, for the first and last time, she saw Clayton Spencer that
morning with her mind, as well as with her heart. She saw him big and
generous and fine, but she saw him also not quite so big as his love,
conventional, bound by tradition and early training, somewhat rigid,
Calvinistic, and dominated still by a fierce sex pride.