In the meanwhile Janet saw much of Rolfe.  Owing to his facile command of language he was peculiarly fitted to draft those proclamations, bombastically worded in the French style, issued and circulated by the Strike Committee—­appeals to the polyglot army to withstand the pangs of hunger, to hold out for the terms laid down, assurances that victory was at hand.  Walking up and down the bibliotheque, his hands behind his back, his red lips gleaming as he spoke, he dictated these documents to Janet.  In the ecstasy of this composition he had a way of shaking his head slowly from side to side, and when she looked up she saw his eyes burning, down at her.  A dozen times a day, while she was at her other work, he would come in and talk to her.  He excited her, she was divided between attraction and fear of him, and often she resented his easy assumption that a tie existed between them—­the more so because this seemed to be taken for granted among certain of his associates.  In their eyes, apparently, she was Rolfe’s recruit in more senses than one.  It was indeed a strange society in which she found herself, and Rolfe typified it.  He lived on the plane of the impulses and intellect, discarded as inhibiting factors what are called moral standards, decried individual discipline and restraint.  And while she had never considered these things, the spectacle of a philosophy—­embodied in him—­that frankly and cynically threw them overboard was disconcerting.  He regarded her as his proselyte, he called her a Puritan, and he seemed more concerned that she should shed these relics of an ancestral code than acquire the doctrines of Sorel and Pouget.  And yet association with him presented the allurement of a dangerous adventure.  Intellectually he fascinated her; and still another motive—­which she partially disguised from herself—­prevented her from repelling him.  That motive had to do with Ditmar.  She tried to put Ditmar from her mind; she sought in desperation, not only to keep busy, but to steep and lose herself in this fierce creed as an antidote to the insistent, throbbing pain that lay ambushed against her moments of idleness.  The second evening of her installation at Headquarters she had worked beyond the supper hour, helping Sanders with his accounts.  She was loath to go home.  And when at last she put on her hat and coat and entered the hall Rolfe, who had been talking to Jastro, immediately approached her.  His liquid eyes regarded her solicitously.

“You must be hungry,” he said.  “Come out with me and have some supper.”

But she was not hungry; what she needed was air.  Then he would walk a little way with her—­he wanted to talk to her.  She hesitated, and then consented.  A fierce hope had again taken possession of her, and when they came to Warren Street she turned into it.

“Where are you going?” Rolfe demanded.

“For a walk,” she said.  “Aren’t you coming?”

“Will you have supper afterwards?”