e of
the innate feminine pity she felt for him. To recount these affairs would
be a mere repetition of identical occurrences. On their second Sunday
excursion he had actually driven her, despite her opposition, several
miles on the Boston road; and her resistance only served to inflame him
the more. It seemed, afterwards, as she sat unnerved, a miracle that she
had stopped him. Then came reproaches: she would not trust him; they
could not be married at once; she must understand that!--an argument so
repugnant as to cause her to shake with sobs of inarticulate anger. After
this he would grow bewildered, then repentant, then contrite. In
contrition--had he known it--he was nearest to victory.

As has been said, she did not intellectualize her reasons, but the core
of her resistance was the very essence of an individuality having its
roots in a self-respecting and self-controlling inheritance--an element
wanting in her sister Lise. It must have been largely the thought of
Lise, the spectacle of Lise--often perhaps unconsciously present that
dominated her conduct; yet reinforcing such an ancestral sentiment was
another, environmental and more complicated, the result in our modern
atmosphere of an undefined feminism apt to reveal itself in many
undesirable ways, but which in reality is a logical projection of the
American tradition of liberty. To submit was not only to lose her
liberty, to become a dependent, but also and inevitably, she thought, to
lose Ditmar's love....

No experience, however, is emotionally continuous, nor was their intimacy
by any means wholly on this plane of conflict. There were hours when,
Ditmar's passion leaving spent itself, they achieved comradeship, in the
office and out of it; revelations for Janet when he talked of himself,
relating the little incidents she found most illuminating. And thus by
degrees she was able to build up a new and truer estimate of him. For
example, she began to perceive that his life outside of his interest in
the mills, instead of being the romance of privileged joys she had once
imagined, had been almost as empty as her own, without either unity or
direction. Her perception was none the less keen because definite terms
were wanting for its expression. The idea of him that first had
captivated her was that of an energized and focussed character
controlling with a sure hand the fortunes of a great organization; of a
power in the city and state, of a being who, in his le