inated to their chosen careers and the tremendous duties and
responsibilities that are the fruit of all achieved ambition.

It was true that she had no political ambition, but for an unpredictive
period she must be the beacon-light of the new Republic, no matter how
successful the coup of the Socialists; until some one man (she knew of
none) or some group of men became strong enough to control its
destinies. The women must stand firm, a solid critical body led by
herself, until the tragically disciplined soldiers who had survived
these years of warfare had ceased to be sheep, or run bleating to the
new fold.

Even if she won Franz over, her power would be sapped; not for a moment
would he be out of her consciousness; her imagination would drift
incessantly from the vital work in hand to the hour of their reunion.
The hurtling power of her eloquence would be diminished, her magnetism
weakened.

Her memory flashed backward to those three years when he was an
ever-rising obsession--personifying love and completion as he
did--before which her proud will fell back again and again, powerless
and humiliated.

Why, in God's name could not he have come back into her life six months
hence?

No woman should risk a sex cataclysm when she has great work to do.
Nature is too subtle for any woman's will as long as the man be
accessible. And the strongest and the proudest woman that ever lived may
have her life disorganized by a man if she possess the power to charm
him.

She moved softly from the couch and walked up and down the room,
striving to visualize her manifest destiny and erect the grim ideal of
duty. Her mind, working at lightning speed, recalled moments, days, in
the past, when she had let her will relax, ignored her duties, floated
idly with the tide; the sensation of panic with which she had recaptured
at a bound the ideals that governed her life. Mortal happiness was not
for her. Duty done, with or without exaltation of spirit, would at least
keep her in tune with life, preserve her from that disintegrating horror
of soul that could end only with self-annihilation.

And end her usefulness. It was a vicious circle.

Suddenly a wave of humiliation, of insupportable shame, swept her from
sole to crown, and she returned swiftly to her post above the sleeping
man. One moment had undone the work of all those proud years during
which she had made herself over from the quintessential lover into one
of the intellectual