Even if she won Franz over, her power would be sapped; not for a moment would he be out of her consciousness; her imagination would drift incessantly from the vital work in hand to the hour of their reunion.  The hurtling power of her eloquence would be diminished, her magnetism weakened.

Her memory flashed backward to those three years when he was an ever-rising obsession—­personifying love and completion as he did—­before which her proud will fell back again and again, powerless and humiliated.

Why, in God’s name could not he have come back into her life six months hence?

No woman should risk a sex cataclysm when she has great work to do.  Nature is too subtle for any woman’s will as long as the man be accessible.  And the strongest and the proudest woman that ever lived may have her life disorganized by a man if she possess the power to charm him.

She moved softly from the couch and walked up and down the room, striving to visualize her manifest destiny and erect the grim ideal of duty.  Her mind, working at lightning speed, recalled moments, days, in the past, when she had let her will relax, ignored her duties, floated idly with the tide; the sensation of panic with which she had recaptured at a bound the ideals that governed her life.  Mortal happiness was not for her.  Duty done, with or without exaltation of spirit, would at least keep her in tune with life, preserve her from that disintegrating horror of soul that could end only with self-annihilation.

And end her usefulness.  It was a vicious circle.

Suddenly a wave of humiliation, of insupportable shame, swept her from sole to crown, and she returned swiftly to her post above the sleeping man.  One moment had undone the work of all those proud years during which she had made herself over from the quintessential lover into one of the intellectual leaders of the world, a woman who had accomplished what no man had dared to attempt, and who, if the revolution were the finality which before this man came had seemed to be written in the Book of Germany, would be immortal in history.  Wild fevers of the blood, passionate longing for completion in man, oneness, the “organic unit”—­were not for her.

All feeling ebbed slowly out of her, leaving her cold, collected, alert.  She was, over all, a woman of genius, the custodian of peculiar gifts, sleeping throughout the ages, perhaps, like Brunhilde on her rock, to awaken not at the kiss of man, but at the summons of Germany in her darkest hour.

She bent over the man who belonged to the woman alone in her and whose power over her would be exerted as ruthlessly as her own should be over herself.  He looked a very gallant gentleman as he lay there, and he had been a very brave soldier.  His own place was secure in the annals of the war, but at this moment, following upon his triumphant swoop after happiness, he was the one deadly menace to the future of his country.