ce at the word. Ditmar
had called her so, too.

"I can't help what I am," she said.

"It is that which inhibits you," he declared. "That Puritanism. It must
be eradicated before you can develop, and then--and then you will be
completely wonderful. When this strike is over, when we have time, I will
teach you many things--develop you. We will read Sorel together he is
beautiful, like poetry--and the great poets, Dante and Petrarch and
Tasso--yes, and d'Annunzio. We shall live."

"We are living, now," she answered. The look with which she surveyed him
he found enigmatic. And then, abruptly, she rose and went to her
typewriter.

"You don't believe what I say!" he reproached her.

But she was cool. "I'm not sure that I believe all of it. I want to think
it out for myself--to talk to others, too."

"What others?"

"Nobody in particular--everybody," she replied, as she set her notebook
on the rack.

"There is some one else!" he exclaimed, rising.

"There is every one else," she said.

As was his habit when agitated, he began to smoke feverishly, glancing at
her from time to time as she fingered the keys. Experience had led him to
believe that he who finds a woman in revolt and gives her a religion
inevitably becomes her possessor. But more than a month had passed, he
had not become her possessor--and now for the first time there entered
his mind a doubt as to having given her a religion! The obvious inference
was that of another man, of another influence in opposition to his own;
characteristically, however, he shrank from accepting this, since he was
of those who believe what they wish to believe. The sudden fear of losing
her--intruding itself immediately upon an ecstatic, creative
mood--unnerved him, yet he strove to appear confident as he stood over
her.

"When you've finished typewriting that, we'll go out to supper," he told
her.

But she shook her head.

"Why not?"

"I don't want to," she replied--and then, to soften her refusal, she
added, "I can't, to-night."

"But you never will come with me anymore. Why is it?"

"I'm very tired at night. I don't feel like going out." She sought to
temporize.

"You've changed!" he accused her. "You're not the same as you were at
first--you avoid me."

The swift gesture with which she flung over the carriage of her machine
might have warned him.

"I don't like that Hampton Hotel," she flashed back. "I'm--I'm not a
vagabond--yet."

"A vagabond!" he repeat