Pale, excited, he sank down into the chair by her side and lit another cigarette.

“They ought to listen to that!” he exclaimed.  “It’s the best one I’ve done yet.”

Night had come.  Czernowitz sat in the other room, talking to Jastro, a buzz of voices came from the hall through the thin pine panels of the door.  All day long a sixty-mile gale had twisted the snow of the lane into whirling, fantastic columns and rattled the windows of Franco-Belgian Hall.  But now the wind had fallen....  Presently, as his self-made music ceased to vibrate within him, Rolfe began to watch the girl as she sat motionless, with parted lips and eyes alight, staring at the reflection of the lamp in the blue-black window.

“Is that the end?” she asked, at length.

“Yes,” he replied sensitively.  “Can’t you see it’s a climax?  Don’t you think it’s a good one?”

She looked at him, puzzled.

“Why, yes,” she said, “I think it’s fine.  You see, I have to take it down so fast I can’t always follow it as I’d like to.”

“When you feel, you can do anything,” he exclaimed.  “It is necessary to feel.”

“It is necessary to know,” she told him.

“I do not understand you,” he cried, leaning toward her.  “Sometimes you are a flame—­a wonderful, scarlet flame I can express it in no other way.  Or again, you are like the Madonna of our new faith, and I wish I were a del Sarto to paint you.  And then again you seem as cold as your New England snow, you have no feeling, you are an Anglo-Saxon—­a Puritan.”

She smiled, though she felt a pang of reminiscence at the word.  Ditmar had called her so, too.

“I can’t help what I am,” she said.

“It is that which inhibits you,” he declared.  “That Puritanism.  It must be eradicated before you can develop, and then—­and then you will be completely wonderful.  When this strike is over, when we have time, I will teach you many things—­develop you.  We will read Sorel together he is beautiful, like poetry—­and the great poets, Dante and Petrarch and Tasso—­yes, and d’Annunzio.  We shall live.”

“We are living, now,” she answered.  The look with which she surveyed him he found enigmatic.  And then, abruptly, she rose and went to her typewriter.

“You don’t believe what I say!” he reproached her.

But she was cool.  “I’m not sure that I believe all of it.  I want to think it out for myself—­to talk to others, too.”

“What others?”

“Nobody in particular—­everybody,” she replied, as she set her notebook on the rack.

“There is some one else!” he exclaimed, rising.

“There is every one else,” she said.