sh suffering in Jennie's
entreaties which moved the daughter of wealth very deeply, and she went
to her bed with a feeling of loss, as though she were taking leave of
something very sweet and elementally comforting.

She thought of her first lover, and her cheeks burned with disgust of
her folly. She thought of two or three good, manly suitors whose
protestations of love had left her cold and humorously critical. On
Lawson's suit she lingered, for he was still a possibility should
she decide to put her soldier-lover away. "But I _have_ done
so--definitely," she said to some pleading within herself. "I can't
marry him; our lives are ordered on divergent lines. I can't come here
to live."

"Happiness is not dependent on material things," argued her newly
awakened self. "He loves you--he is handsome and true and good."

"But I don't love him."

"Yes, you do. When you returned Osborne Lawson's ring you quite plainly
said so."

She burned with a new flame with this confession; but she protested,
"Let us be sensible! Let us argue!"

"You cannot argue with love."

"I am not a child to be carried away by a momentary gust of emotion. See
how impossible it is for me to share his work--his austere life."

And here entered the far-reaching question of the life and death of a
race. In a most disturbing measure this obscure young soldier
represented a view of life--of civilization antagonistic to her faith,
and in stern opposition to the teachings of her father. In a subtle
fashion he had warped the word _duty_ from its martial significance to a
place in a lofty philosophy whose tenets were only just beginning to
unfold their inner meaning to her.

Was it not true that she was less sympathetic with the poor brown
peoples of the earth than with the animals? "How can you be contemptuous
of God's children, whom the physical universe has colored brown or black
or yellow--you, who are indignant when a beast is overburdened? If we
repudiate and condemn to death those who do not please us, who will
live?"

She felt in herself some singular commotion. Conceptions, hitherto mere
shells of thought, became infilled with passion; and pity, hitherto a
feeble sentiment with her, expanded into an emotion which shook her,
filled her throat with sobs, discrediting her old self with her new self
till the thought of her mean and selfish art brought shame. How small it
all was, how trivial, beside the consciousness of duty well done,
measu