hat 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 repeated.

She went on savagely with her work..

"You have two natur