His sister presented the problem that most distressed Lane.  She had her good qualities, and through them could be reached.  But she was thoughtless, vacillating, and wilful.  She had made him promises only to break them.  Lane had caught her in falsehoods.  And upon being called to account she had told him that if he didn’t like it he could “lump” it.  Of late she had grown away from what affection she had shown at first.  She could not bear interference with her pleasures, and seemed uncontrollable.  Lane felt baffled.  This thing was a Juggernaut impossible to stop.

Lane had scraped acquaintance with Harry Hale, one of Lorna’s admirers, a boy of eighteen, who lived with his widowed mother on the edge of the town.  He appeared to be an industrious, intelligent, quiet fellow, not much given to the prevailing habits of the young people.  In his humble worship of Lorna he was like a dog.  Lorna went to the motion pictures with him occasionally, when she had no other opportunity for excitement.  Lane gathered that Lorna really liked this boy, and when with him seemed more natural, more what a fifteen-year-old girl used to be.  And somehow it was upon this boy that Lane placed a forlorn hope.

No more automobiles honked in front of the home to call Lorna out.  She met her friends away from the house, and returning at night she walked the last few blocks.  It was this fact that awoke Lane’s serious suspicions.

Another problem lay upon Lane’s heart; if not so distressing as Lorna’s, still one that added to his sorrow and his perplexity.  He had gone once to call on Mel Iden.  Mel Iden was all soul.  Whatever had been the facts of her downfall—­and reflection on that hurt Lane so strangely he could not bear it—­it had not been on her part a matter of sex.  She was far above wantonness.

Through long hours in the dark of night, when Lane’s pain kept him sleepless, he had pondered over the mystery of Mel Iden until it cleared.  She typified the mother of the race.  In all periods of the progress of the race, war had brought out this instinct in women—­to give themselves for the future.  It was a provision of nature, inscrutable and terrible.  How immeasurable the distance between Mel Iden and those women who practised birth control!  As the war had brought out hideous greed and baseness, so had it propelled forward and upward the noblest attributes of life.  Mel Iden was a builder, not a destroyer.  She had been sexless and selfless.  Unconsciously during the fever and emotion of the training of American men for service abroad, and the poignancy of their departure, to fight, and perhaps never return, Mel Iden had answered to this mysterious instinct of nature.  Then, with the emotion past, and face to face with staggering consequences, she had reacted to conscious instincts.  She had proved the purity of her surrender.  She was all mother.  And Lane began to see her moving in a crystal, beautiful light.