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.

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.