As was his habit when agitated, he began to smoke feverishly, glancing at her from time to time as she fingered the keys.  Experience had led him to believe that he who finds a woman in revolt and gives her a religion inevitably becomes her possessor.  But more than a month had passed, he had not become her possessor—­and now for the first time there entered his mind a doubt as to having given her a religion!  The obvious inference was that of another man, of another influence in opposition to his own; characteristically, however, he shrank from accepting this, since he was of those who believe what they wish to believe.  The sudden fear of losing her—­intruding itself immediately upon an ecstatic, creative mood—­unnerved him, yet he strove to appear confident as he stood over her.

“When you’ve finished typewriting that, we’ll go out to supper,” he told her.

But she shook her head.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to,” she replied—­and then, to soften her refusal, she added, “I can’t, to-night.”

“But you never will come with me anymore.  Why is it?”

“I’m very tired at night.  I don’t feel like going out.”  She sought to temporize.

“You’ve changed!” he accused her.  “You’re not the same as you were at first—­you avoid me.”

The swift gesture with which she flung over the carriage of her machine might have warned him.

“I don’t like that Hampton Hotel,” she flashed back.  “I’m—­I’m not a vagabond—­yet.”

“A vagabond!” he repeated.

She went on savagely with her work..

“You have two natures,” he exclaimed.  “You are still a bourgeoise, a Puritan.  You will not be yourself, you will not be free until you get over that.”

“I’m not sure I want to get over it.”

He leaned nearer to her.

“But now that I have found you, Janet, I will not let you go.”

“You’ve no rights over me,” she cried, in sudden alarm and anger.  “I’m not doing this work, I’m not wearing myself out here for you.”

“Then—­why are you doing it?” His suspicions rose again, and made him reckless.

“To help the strikers,” she said....  He could get no more out of her, and presently, when Anna Mower entered the room, he left it....

More than once since her first visit to the soup kitchen in Dey Street Janet had returned to it.  The universe rocked, but here was equilibrium.  The streets were filled with soldiers, with marching strikers, terrible things were constantly happening; the tension at Headquarters never seemed to relax.  Out in the world and within her own soul were strife and suffering, and sometimes fear; the work in which she sought to lose herself no longer sufficed to keep her from thinking, and the spectacle —­when she returned home—­of her mother’s increasing apathy grew more and more appalling.  But in Dey Street she gained calmness, was able to renew something of that sense of proportion the lack