In her own room she unleashed the strange bonds on her feelings and suffered their recurrent surge and strife, until relief and calmness returned to her.  Then came a flashing uplift of soul, a great and beautiful exaltation.  Lenore felt that she had been gifted with incalculable power.  She had pierced Dorn’s fatalistic consciousness with the truth and glory of possible life, as opposed to the dark and evil morbidity of war.  She saw for herself the wonderful and terrible stairs of sand which women had been climbing all the ages, and must climb on to the heights of solid rock, of equality, of salvation for the human race.  She saw woman, the primitive, the female of the species, but she saw her also as the mother of the species, made to save as well as perpetuate, learning from the agony of child-birth and child-care the meaning of Him who said, “Thou shalt not kill!” Tremendous would be the final resistance of woman to the brutality of man.  Women were to be the saviors of humanity.  It seemed so simple and natural that it could not be otherwise.  Lenore realized, with a singular conception of the splendor of its truth, that when most women had found themselves, their mission in life, as she had found hers, then would come an end to violence, to greed, to hate, to war, to the black and hideous imperfection of mankind.

With all her intellect and passion Lenore opposed the theory of the scientist and biologists.  If they proved that strife and fight were necessary to the development of man, that without violence and bloodshed and endless contention the race would deteriorate, then she would say that it would be better to deteriorate and to die.  Women all would declare against that, and in fact would never believe.  She would never believe with her heart, but if her intellect was forced to recognize certain theories, then she must find a way to reconcile life to the inscrutable designs of nature.  The theory that continual strife was the very life of plants, birds, beasts, and men seemed verified by every reaction of the present; but if these things were fixed materialistic rules of the existence of animated forms upon the earth, what then was God, what was the driving force in Kurt Dorn that made war-duty some kind of murder which overthrew his mind, what was the love in her heart of all living things, and the nameless sublime faith in her soul?

“If we poor creatures must fight,” said Lenore, and she meant this for a prayer, “let the women fight eternally against violence, and let the men forever fight their destructive instincts!”

* * * * *

From that hour the condition of Kurt Dorn changed for the better.  Doctor Lowell admitted that Lenore had been the one medicine which might defeat the death that all except she had believed inevitable.

Lenore was permitted to see him a few minutes every day, for which fleeting interval she must endure the endless hours.  But she discovered that only when he was rational and free from pain would they let her go in.  What Dorn’s condition was all the rest of the time she could not guess.  But she began to get inklings that it was very bad.