Ditmar demanded a table in the corner, and consumed a solitary meal.

Very naturally Janet was aware of the change in Ditmar, and knew the cause of it.  Her feelings were complicated.  He, the most important man in Hampton, the self-sufficient, the powerful, the hitherto distant and unattainable head of the vast organization known as the Chippering Mill, of which she was an insignificant unit, at times became for her just a man—­a man for whom she had achieved a delicious contempt.  And the knowledge that she, if she chose, could sway and dominate him by the mere exercise of that strange feminine force within her was intoxicating and terrifying.  She read this in a thousand signs; in his glances; in his movements revealing a desire to touch her; in little things he said, apparently insignificant, yet fraught with meaning; in a constant recurrence of the apologetic attitude—­so alien to the Ditmar formerly conceived—­of which he had given evidence that day by the canal:  and from this attitude emanated, paradoxically, a virile and galvanic current profoundly disturbing.  Sometimes when he bent over her she experienced a commingled ecstasy and fear that he would seize her in his arms.  Yet the tension was not constant, rising and falling with his moods and struggles, all of which she read—­unguessed by him—­as easily as a printed page by the gift that dispenses with laborious processes of the intellect.  On the other hand, a resentment boiled within her his masculine mind failed to fathom.  Stevenson said of John Knox that many women had come to learn from him, but he had never condescended to become a learner in return—­a remark more or less applicable to Ditmar.  She was, perforce, thrilled that he was virile and wanted her, but because he wanted her clandestinely her pride revolted, divining his fear of scandal and hating him for it like a thoroughbred.  To do her justice, marriage never occurred to her.  She was not so commonplace.

There were times, however, when the tension between them would relax, when some incident occurred to focus Ditmar’s interest on the enterprise that had absorbed and unified his life, the Chippering Mill.  One day in September, for instance, after an absence in New York, he returned to the office late in the afternoon, and she was quick to sense his elation, to recognize in him the restored presence of the quality of elan, of command, of singleness of purpose that had characterized him before she had become his stenographer.  At first, as he read his mail, he seemed scarcely conscious of her presence.  She stood by the window, awaiting his pleasure, watching the white mist as it rolled over the floor of the river, catching glimpses in vivid, saffron blurs of the lights of the Arundel Mill on the farther shore.  Autumn was at hand.  Suddenly she heard Ditmar speaking.

“Would you mind staying a little while longer this evening, Miss Bumpus?”

“Not at all,” she replied, turning.