t, so that she might
sleep.

She had suffered deeply through his facetious recital of her story, it
was not until she understood that he was hurt by her neglect to offer
him the book that she could force herself to forgive it. How they
stumbled about in the dark, missing each other! Was it so in better
regulated marriages? Did men and women really ever truly understand each
other?

Jane pondered the question as to whether the initial dissimilarity
between them was being widened by the engulfing current that was
sweeping woman on so rapidly into new waters of unrest. If this storm
was carrying her into any more than a temporary separation of interest
from man's, then it meant destruction and the need of rebuilding. Men
seemed to be blaming women with the unrest in the world to-day. Jerry
voiced a grievance against them as trouble makers. It was like blaming
the sea for its attraction for the moon--accusing the sun for sailing
through its orbit. A force--generated who knows how or where?--had been
set in motion. Call it education, industrial and economic freedom, or
what you will, it had happened. Women could not start it--could not stop
it. Nor could men.

Ours is an age of conflict, of rapid change, taking place in our
knowledge and all about us. The conflict is psychological as well as
material. Take one small detail of our machinery. In Jane's own lifetime
had come a total revolution in man's method of transportation. Subways,
elevated trains, automobiles, aeroplanes. How swiftly must the
individual readjust himself. He has within him, intensified, the
struggle and the discoordination which is taking place in the large
social group. He has to meet the crisis of accepting daily new truths,
while he is bound, even tortured, by traditional convictions.

It was because the Jerry type of man did not see that this
discoordination ramified into every corner of our lives--that it is
religious, social, political, as well as material and domestic. But
boy-man that he was, he recognized it only where it struck home quickest
to him, in his sex life, in his marital relations. He could not realize
that this was not the basis of the whole unrest and therefore to be laid
at woman's door--that it was only reaction from an universal
discoordination.

She had tried to work this out in her book; she had striven with all her
power to get above this seething, boiling, electrified whirlpool that
we call life, to find purpose in it--d