ding her mirrored eyes--as
she cut her finger nails.

IV

Jane was mistaken in her guess at the cause of Victor Dorn's agitation
and abrupt flight. If he had any sense whatever of the secret she had
betrayed to him and to herself at the same instant it was wholly
unconscious. He had become panic-stricken and had fled because he,
faced with her exuberance and tempting wealth of physical charm, had
become suddenly conscious of her and of himself in a way as new to him
as if he had been fresh from a monkery where no woman had ever been
seen. Thus far the world had been peopled for him with human beings
without any reference to sex. The phenomena of sex had not interested
him because his mind had been entirely taken up with the other aspects
of life; and he had not yet reached the stage of development where a
thinker grasps the truth that all questions are at bottom questions of
the sex relation, and that, therefore, no question can be settled right
until the sex relations are settled right.

Jane Hastings was the first girl he had met in his whole life who was
in a position to awaken that side of his nature. And when his brain
suddenly filled with a torrent of mad longings and of sensuous
appreciations of her laces and silk, of her perfume and smoothness and
roundness, of the ecstasy that would come from contact with those warm,
rosy lips--when Victor Dorn found himself all in a flash eager
impetuosity to seize this woman whom he did not approve of, whom he did
not even like, he felt bowed with shame. He would not have believed
himself capable of such a thing. He fled.

He fled, but she pursued. And when he sat down in the garden behind
his mother's cottage, to work at a table where bees and butterflies had
been his only disturbers, there was this SHE before him--her soft,
shining gaze fascinating his gaze, her useless but lovely white hands
extended tantalizingly toward him.

As he continued to look at her, his disapproval and dislike melted. "I
was brutally harsh to her," he thought repentantly.

"She was honestly trying to do the decent thing. How was she to know?
And wasn't I as much wrong as right in advising her not to help the
men?"

Beyond question, it was theoretically best for the two opposing forces,
capital and labor, to fight their battle to its inevitable end without
interference, without truce, with quarter neither given nor taken on
either side. But practically--wasn't there somethin