Strength!  The shaded lamplight fell upon his fearless kindly face with its flashing eyes and its humorous mouth.  He ought to have been drinking out of a horn, not a wine glass that his well-shaped hand could have crushed by a careless pressure.  In a winged helmet and a coat of mail he would have looked so much more fitly dressed than in that soft felt hat and ridiculous blue tie.

She led him to talk on about the future.  She loved to hear his clear, confident voice with its touch of boyish boastfulness.  What was there to stop him?  Why should he not climb from power to power till he had reached the end!

And as he talked and dreamed there grew up in her heart a fierce anger.  What would her own future be?  She would marry probably some man of her own class, settle down to the average woman’s “life”; be allowed, like a spoilt child, to still “take an interest” in public affairs:  hold “drawing-rooms” attended by cranks and political nonentities:  be President, perhaps, of the local Woman’s Liberal League.  The alternative:  to spend her days glued to a desk, penning exhortations to the people that Carleton and his like might or might not allow them to read; while youth and beauty slipped away from her, leaving her one of the ten thousand other lonely, faded women, forcing themselves unwelcome into men’s jobs.  There came to her a sense of having been robbed of what was hers by primitive eternal law.  Greyson had been right.  She did love power—­power to serve and shape the world.  She would have earned it and used it well.  She could have helped him, inspired him.  They would have worked together:  he the force and she the guidance.  She would have supplied the things he lacked.  It was to her he came for counsel, as it was.  But for her he would never have taken the first step.  What right had this poor brainless lump of painted flesh to share his wounds, his triumphs?  What help could she give him when the time should come that he should need it?

Suddenly he broke off.  “What a fool I’m making of myself,” he said.  “I always was a dreamer.”

She forced a laugh.  “Why shouldn’t it come true?” she asked.

They had the little garden to themselves.  The million lights of Paris shone below them.

“Because you won’t be there,” he answered, “and without you I can’t do it.  You think I’m always like I am to-night, bragging, confident.  So I am when you are with me.  You give me back my strength.  The plans and hopes and dreams that were slipping from me come crowding round me, laughing and holding out their hands.  They are like the children.  They need two to care for them.  I want to talk about them to someone who understands them and loves them, as I do.  I want to feel they are dear to someone else, as well as to myself:  that I must work for them for her sake, as well as for my own.  I want someone to help me to bring them up.”