It was her turn to color.  But, elbowing instinctive resentment, came uneasiness.  His love seemed to her of the sort that flowers in the romances—­the love that endures all, asks nothing, lives forever upon its own unfed fire.  As is so often the case with women whose charms move men to extravagance of speech and emotion, it was a great satisfaction to her, to her vanity, to feel that she had inspired this wonderful immortal flame; obviously, to feed such a flame by giving love for love would reduce it to the commonplace.  All women start with these exaggerated notions of the value of being loved; few of them ever realize and rouse themselves, or are aroused, from their vanity to the truth that the value is all the other way.  Adelaide was only the natural woman in blindly fancying that Dory was the one to be commiserated, in not seeing that she herself was a greater loser than he, that to return his love would not be a concession but an acquisition.  Most men are content to love, to compel women to receive their love; they prefer the passive, the receptive attitude in the woman, and are even bored by being actively loved in return; for love is exacting, and the male is impatient of exaction.  Adelaide did not understand just this broad but subtle difference between Dory and “most men”—­that he would feel that he was violating her were he to sweep her away in the arms of his impetuous released passion, as he knew he could.  He felt that such a yielding was, after all, like the inert obedience of the leaf to the storm wind—­that what he could compel, what women call love, would be as utterly without substance as an image in a mirror, indeed, would be a mere passive reflection of his own love—­all most men want, but worthless to him.

Could it be that Dory’s love had become—­no, not less, but less ardent?  She saw that he was deep in thought—­about her, she assumed, with an unconscious vanity which would have excited the mockery of many who have more vanity than had she, and perhaps with less excuse.  In fact, he was not thinking of her; having the ability to turn his mind completely where he willed—­the quality of all strong men, and the one that often makes the weak-willed think them hard—­he was revolving the vast and inspiring plans Arthur and he had just got into practical form—­plans for new factories and mills such as a university, professing to be in the forefront of progress need not be ashamed to own or to offer to its students as workshops.  All that science has bestowed in the way of making labor and its surroundings clean and comfortable, healthful and attractive, was to be provided; all that the ignorance and the shortsighted greediness of employers, bent only on immediate profits and keeping their philanthropy for the smug penuriousness and degrading stupidity of charity, deny to their own self-respect and to justice for their brothers in their power.  Arthur and he had wrought it all out, had discovered as a crowning vindication that the result would be profitable in dollars, that their sane and shrewd utopianism would produce larger dividends than the sordid and slovenly methods of their competitors.  “It is always so.  Science is always economical as well as enlightened and humane,” Dory was thinking when Adelaide’s voice broke into his reverie.