poetical apologetics.  Stripped of the glamour of these, was not Rolfe’s doctrine just one of taking, taking?  And when the workers were in possession of all, would not they be as badly off as Mrs. Brocklehurst or Ditmar?  Rolfe, despite the inspiring intellectual creed he professed, lacked the poise and unity that go with happiness.  He wanted things, for himself:  whereas she beheld in Insall one who seemed emancipated from possessions, whose life was so organized as to make them secondary affairs.  And she began to wonder what Insall would think of Ditmar.

These sudden flashes of tenderness for Ditmar startled and angered her.  She had experienced them before, and always had failed to account for their intrusion into a hatred she cherished.  Often, at her desk in the bibliotheque, she had surprised herself speculating upon what Ditmar might be doing at that moment; and it seemed curious, living in the same city with him, that she had not caught a glimpse of him during the strike.  More than once, moved by a perverse impulse, she had ventured of an evening down West Street toward the guard of soldiers in the hope of catching sight of him.  He had possessed her, and the memory of the wild joy of that possession, of that surrender to great strength, refused to perish.  Why, at such moments, should she glory in a strength that had destroyed her and why, when she heard him cursed as the man who stood, more than any other, in the way of the strikers victory, should she paradoxically and fiercely rejoice? why should she feel pride when she was told of the fearlessness with which he went about the streets, and her heart stop beating when she thought of the possibility of his being shot?  For these unwelcome phenomena within herself Janet could not account.  When they disturbed and frightened her, she plunged into her work with the greater zeal....

As the weeks went by, the strain of the strike began to tell on the weak, the unprepared, on those who had many mouths to feed.  Shivering with the cold of that hardest of winters, these unfortunates flocked to the Franco-Belgian Hall, where a little food or money in proportion to the size of their families was doled out to them.  In spite of the contributions received by mail, of the soup kitchens and relief stations set up by various organizations in various parts of the city, the supply little more than sufficed to keep alive the more needy portion of the five and twenty thousand who now lacked all other means of support.  Janet’s heart was wrung as she gazed at the gaunt, bewildered faces growing daily more tragic, more bewildered and gaunt; she marvelled at the animal-like patience of these Europeans, at the dumb submission of most of them to privations that struck her as appalling.  Some indeed complained, but the majority recited in monotonous, unimpassioned tones their stories of suffering, or of ill treatment by the “Cossacks” or the police.  The stipends were doled out by Czernowitz, but all through the week there were special appeals.  Once it was a Polish woman, wan and white, who carried her baby wrapped in a frayed shawl.