And then Billy knew.

He stood moveless staring up at her; never, perhaps, had human eyes asked so definite a question or begged so definite a boon.

She sat moveless, staring straight down at him.  But her eyes continued to withhold all answer, all reassurance.

After a while, she stirred and the spell broke.  She opened and shut her wings, half a dozen times before she ventured to leave her perch.  But once, in the air, all her strength, physical and mental, seemed to come back.  She shook the hair out of her eyes.  She pulled her drapery together.  For a moment, she lingered near, floating, almost moveless, white, shining, carved, chiseled:  like a marvelous piece of aerial sculpture.  Then a flush of a delicate dawn-pink came into her white face.  She caught the great tumbled mass of hair in both hands, tied it about her head.  Swift as a flash of lightning, she turned, wheeled, soared, dipped.  And for the first time, Billy heard her laugh.  Her laughter was like a child’s — gleeful.  But each musical ripple thrust like a knife into his heart.

He watched her cleave the distance, watched her disappear.  Then, suddenly, a curious weakness came over him.  His head swam and he could not see distinctly.  Every bone in his body seemed to repudiate its function; his flexed muscles slid him gently to the earth.  Time passed.  After a while consciousness came back.  His dizziness ceased.  But he lay for a long while, face downward, his forehead against the cool moss.  Again and again that awful picture came, the long, white, girl-shape shooting earthwards, the ghastly, tortured face, the frenzied, heaving shoulders.  It was to come again many times in the next week, that picture, and for years to make recurrent horror in his sleep.

He returned to the camp white, wrung, and weak.  Apparently his companions had been busy at their various occupations.  Nobody had seen Julia’s fall; at least nobody mentioned it.  After dinner, when the nightly argument broke into its first round, he was silent for a while.  Then, “Oh, I might as well tell you, Frank, and you, Pete,” he said abruptly, “that I’ve gone over to the other side.  I’m for capture, friendship by capture, marriage by capture — whatever you choose to call it — but capture.”

The other four stared at him.  “What’s happened to you and Ju — " Honey began.  But he stopped, flushing.

Billy paid no attention to the bitten-off end of Honey’s question.  “Nothing’s happened to me,” he lied simply and directly.  “I don’t know why I’ve changed, but I have.  I think this is a case where the end justifies the means.  Women don’t know what’s best for them.  We do.  Unguided, they take the awful risks of their awful ignorance.  Moreover, they are the conservative sex.  They have no conscious initiative.  These flying-women, for instance, have plenty of physical courage but no mental or moral courage.  They hold the whip-hand, of course, now.