However, to Joe there had been revealed—­almost in a day and after thirty-eight years of insulated life—­two of the supreme human facts.  There was humanity, on the one side, building the future, the new state, organizing its scattered millions into a rich, healthy, joyous life and calling to every man to enlist in the ranks of the creators; and then there was woman, the undying splendor of the world, the beauty that drenches life with meaning and magic, that stirs the elemental in a man, that wakens the race instinct, that demands the creation of new generations to inhabit that new state of the future.  Intertwined, these wondrous things drew the heart now this way, now that, and to Joe they arose separately in intermittent pulsations that threatened to absorb his existence.

He did not dare go to Myra until he was sure of himself.  It seemed that he would have to choose between woman and work.  It seemed as if his work would lead into peril, dirt, disaster, and that he could not ask a delicate, high-strung woman to go with him.  The woman could not follow her warrior to the battle, for marriage meant children to Joe, and the little ones must stay back at home with the mother.

In that moment of clear terror he had said to Myra: 

“I may never see you again....  I belong to those dead girls.”

And this phrase came and went like a refrain.  He must choose between her and those “dead girls.”  There stood Myra with gray luminous eyes and soft echoing voice magically hinting of a life of ever-renewed romance.  She had a breast for his aching head, she had in her hands a thousand darling household things, she had in her the possibilities of his own children ... who should bring a wind of laughter into his days and a strange domestic tenderness.  The depths of the man were stirred by these appeals—­that was the happy human way to take, the common road fringed with wild flowers and brier-lost berries, and glorious with the stride of health and the fresh open air.

And Myra herself, that charming presence to infold his life—­He would go walking through the golden October park, by little leaf-strewn paths under the wild and sun-soaked foliage, with many vistas every way of luring mystery, and over all the earth the rich opulent mother-bliss of harvest, and his heart would ache, ache within him, ache for his own harvests, ache like the sun for the earth, the man for the woman.

A mad frenzy would seize him and he would plunge into his books and read and think and lash himself to a fury of speculation till the early hours of the morning.  Exhaustion alone brought him peace.

But something had to be done.  He sat down and wrote to her with a trembling hand: 

  Dear Myra,—­Though I am impatient to see you, I
  must yet wait a little while.  Bear with me.  You will
  understand later.

  Yours,
  Joe.

And then she replied: