your great lovers—­of other women.  You are Beth Truba of street and studio.  You can send lovers away.  You can make them afraid of your tongue, strip them of all ardor with your nineteenth century bigotry....  You have so many years to waste.  Empty arms are so light and cool, their veins are never scorched; they never dry with age!...  Oh, red-haired Beth Truba, all the spaces of sky are laughing at you!  To-morrow or next day, by the ocean, another woman will start the flames in those cool eyes of his, and feel them singing around her!...  Why do you let him go?  Only a nineteenth century mind with the ideas of a slave woman would let him go!...  Keep him with you.  Show your power.  Create the giant.  By no means is that the least of woman’s work!”

She shuddered at such a descent.

“Would you go back and be the waiting spider forever in the yellow-brown studio, breaking your heart in the little room when some woman chooses to bring you news of men and the world?  You would not descend to woman’s purest prerogative?...  Greater women than you shall come, and they shall avail themselves of that, and their children shall be great in the land....”

“Oh, what a world, and what a fool!” Beth said aloud.

“Why?”

She turned at his quick, imperious tone.

“I don’t—­I don’t know.  It just came!”

Beth bit her lip, and shut her eyes.  There was a booming in her brain, as from cataracts and rapids.  His face had made her suddenly weak, but there was something glorious in being carried along in this wild current.  She had battled so long.  She was no longer herself, but part of him.  The face she had seen was white; the eyes dark and piercing, terrible in their concentration of power, but not terrible to her.  All the magic from the sunlight had come to them.  They were the eyes which command brute matter....  The Other had become a giant; this man a god.

“What a day!” she whispered.

“Let’s ride on!” he said swiftly.

The horses whirled about at his word.  As his hand touched hers, she felt the thrill of it, in her limbs and scalp.  He lifted her to the saddle.  There was something invincible in his arms.  The strength he used was nothing compared to that which was reserved....

She seemed the plaything of some furious, reckless happiness....  “Asking nothing!  Asking nothing!” repeated again and again in her brain.  And what should he ask—­and why?...  Her thoughts flew by and upward—­intent, but swift to vanish, like bees in high noon.  Atoms of concentrated sunlight, sun-gold upon their wings....  The good hot sun, all the earth stretched out for it, and giving forth green tributes.  The newest leaf and the oldest tree alike expanded with praise....  What a splendor to be out of the city and the paint and the tragedy; to have in her veins the warm brown earth and the good hot sun—­and this mighty dynamo beneath!  She was mad with it all, and glad it was so.