“But suppose you don’t get what you want?” she objected.  “What then?  Suppose one doesn’t become a superman? or a superwoman?  What’s to happen to one?  Is there no god but the superman’s god, which is himself?  Are there no gods for those who can’t be supermen? or for those who may refuse to be supermen?”

To refuse, I maintained, were a weakness of the will.

“But there are other wills,” she persisted, “wills over which the superman may conceivably have no control.  Suppose, for example, that you don’t get me, that my will intervenes, granting it to be conceivable that your future happiness and welfare, as you insist, depend upon your getting me—­which I doubt.”

“You’ve no reason to doubt it.”

“Well, granting it, then.  Suppose the orthodoxies and superstitions succeed in inhibiting me.  I may not be a superwoman, but my will, or my conscience, if you choose, may be stronger than yours.  If you don’t get what you want, you aren’t happy.  In other words, you fail.  Where are your gods then?  The trouble with you, my dear Hugh, is that you have never failed,” she went on, “you’ve never had a good, hard fall, you’ve always been on the winning side, and you’ve never had the world against you.  No wonder you don’t understand the meaning and value of tragedy.”

“And you?” I asked.

“No,” she agreed, “nor I. Yet I have come to feel, instinctively, that somehow concealed in tragedy is the central fact of life, the true reality, that nothing is to be got by dodging it, as we have dodged it.  Your superman, at least the kind of superman you portray, is petrified.  Something vital in him, that should be plastic and sensitive, has turned to stone.”

“Since when did you begin to feel this?” I inquired uneasily.

“Since—­well, since we have been together again, in the last month or two.  Something seems to warn me that if we take—­what we want, we shan’t get it.  That’s an Irish saying, I know, but it expresses my meaning.  I may be little, I may be superstitious, unlike the great women of history who have dared.  But it’s more than mere playing safe—­my instinct, I mean.  You see, you are involved.  I believe I shouldn’t hesitate if only myself were concerned, but you are the uncertain quantity—­more uncertain than you have any idea; you think you know yourself, you think you have analyzed yourself, but the truth is, Hugh, you don’t know the meaning of struggle against real resistance.”

I was about to protest.

“I know that you have conquered in the world of men and affairs,” she hurried on, “against resistance, but it isn’t the kind of resistance I mean.  It doesn’t differ essentially from the struggle in the animal kingdom.”

I bowed.  “Thank you,” I said.

She laughed a little.