And again he had to wait for an answer.

“Because you’ve spoiled my life—­because I’m going to have a child!”

“What do you mean?  Are you?... it can’t be possible.”

“It is possible, it’s true—­it’s true.  I’ve waited and waited, I’ve suffered, I’ve almost gone crazy—­and now I know.  And I said I’d kill you if it were so, I’d kill myself—­only I can’t.  I’m a coward.”  Her voice was drowned again by weeping.

A child!  He had never imagined such a contingency!  And as he leaned back against the desk, his emotions became chaotic.  The sight of her, even as she appeared crazed by anger, had set his passion aflame—­for the intensity and fierceness of her nature had always made a strong appeal to dominant qualities in Ditmar’s nature.  And then—­this announcement!  Momentarily it turned his heart to water.  Now that he was confronted by an exigency that had once vicariously yet deeply disturbed him in a similar affair of a friend of his, the code and habit of a lifetime gained an immediate ascendency—­since then he had insisted that this particular situation was to be avoided above all others.  And his mind leaped to possibilities.  She had wished to kill him—­would she remain desperate enough to ruin him?  Even though he were not at a crisis in his affairs, a scandal of this kind would be fatal.

“I didn’t know,” he said desperately, “I couldn’t guess.  Do you think I would have had this thing happen to you?  I was carried away—­we were both carried away—­”

“You planned it!” she replied vehemently, without looking up.  “You didn’t care for me, you only—­wanted me.”

“That isn’t so—­I swear that isn’t so.  I loved you I love you.”

“Oh, do you think I believe that?” she exclaimed.

“I swear it—­I’ll prove it!” he protested.  Still under the influence of an acute anxiety, he was finding it difficult to gather his wits, to present his case.  “When you left me that day the strike began—­when you left me without giving me a chance—­you’ll never know how that hurt me.”

“You’ll never know how it hurt me!” she interrupted.

“Then why, in God’s name, did you do it?  I wasn’t myself, then, you ought to have seen that.  And when I heard from Caldwell here that you’d joined those anarchists—­”

“They’re no worse than you are—­they only want what you’ve got,” she said.

He waved this aside.  “I couldn’t believe it—­I wouldn’t believe it until somebody saw you walking with one of them to their Headquarters.  Why did you do it?”

“Because I know how they feel, I sympathize with the strikers, I want them to win—­against you!” She lifted her head and looked at him, and in spite of the state of his feelings he felt a twinge of admiration at her defiance.

“Because you love me!” he said.

“Because I hate you,” she answered.

And yet a spark of exultation leaped within him at the thought that love had caused this apostasy.  He had had that suspicion before, though it was a poor consolation when he could not reach her.  Now she had made it vivid.  A woman’s logic, or lack of logic—­her logic.