By WINSTON CHURCHILL

Volume 2

CHAPTER IX

At certain moments during the days that followed the degree of tension her relationship with Ditmar had achieved tested the limits of Janet’s ingenuity and powers of resistance.  Yet the sense of mastery at being able to hold such a man in leash was by no means unpleasurable to a young woman of her vitality and spirit.  There was always the excitement that the leash might break—­and then what?  Here was a situation, she knew instinctively, that could not last, one fraught with all sorts of possibilities, intoxicating or abhorrent to contemplate; and for that very reason fascinating.  When she was away from Ditmar and tried to think about it she fell into an abject perplexity, so full was it of anomalies and contradictions, of conflicting impulses; so far beyond her knowledge and experience.  For Janet had been born in an age which is rapidly discarding blanket morality and taboos, which has as yet to achieve the morality of scientific knowledge, of the individual instance.  Tradition, convention, the awful examples portrayed for gain in the movies, even her mother’s pessimistic attitude in regard to the freedom with which the sexes mingle to-day were powerless to influence her.  The thought, however, that she might fundamentally resemble her sister Lise, despite a fancied superiority, did occasionally shake her and bring about a revulsion against Ditmar.  Janet’s problem was in truth, though she failed so to specialize it, the supreme problem of our time:  what is the path to self-realization? how achieve emancipation from the commonplace?

Was she in love with Ditmar?  The question was distasteful, she avoided it, for enough of the tatters of orthodox Christianity clung to her to cause her to feel shame when she contemplated the feelings he aroused in her.  It was when she asked herself what his intentions were that her resentment burned, pride and a sense of her own value convinced her that he had deeply insulted her in not offering marriage.  Plainly, he did not intend to offer marriage; on the other hand, if he had done so, a profound, self-respecting and moral instinct in her would, in her present mood, have led her to refuse.  She felt a fine scorn for the woman who, under the circumstances, would insist upon a bond and all a man’s worldly goods in return for that which it was her privilege to give freely; while the notion of servility, of economic dependence—­though she did not so phrase it—­repelled her far more than the possibility of social ruin.

This she did not contemplate at all; her impulse to leave Hampton and Ditmar had nothing to do with that....

Away from Ditmar, this war of inclinations possessed her waking mind, invaded her dreams.  When she likened herself to the other exploited beings he drove to run his mills and fill his orders,—­of whom Mr. Siddons had spoken—­her resolution to leave Hampton gained such definite ascendancy that her departure seemed only a matter of hours.