From the window he could see the roof of the studio building where Neville lived.
And he wondered how far Valerie was from that building at the present moment, wondered, and sipped his coffee.
He was a man whose career had been builded upon perseverance.

He had begun life by slaying every doubt.

And his had been a bitter life; but he had suffered smilingly; the sordid struggle along the edges of starvation had hardened nothing of his heart.
Sensitive, sympathetic, ardent, proud, and ambitious with the quiet certainty of a man predestined, he had a woman's capacity for patience, for suffering, and for concealment, but not for mercy.

And he cared passionately for love as he did for beauty--had succumbed to both in spirit oftener than in the caprice of some inconsequential amourette.
But never, until he came to know Valerie West, had a living woman meant anything vital to his happiness.

Yet, what she aroused in him was that part of his nature to which he himself was a stranger--a restless, sensuous side which her very isolation and exposure to danger seemed to excite the more until desire to control her, to drive others away, to subdue, master, mould her, make her his own, obsessed him.