On their second Sunday excursion he had actually driven her, despite her opposition, several miles on the Boston road; and her resistance only served to inflame him the more.  It seemed, afterwards, as she sat unnerved, a miracle that she had stopped him.  Then came reproaches:  she would not trust him; they could not be married at once; she must understand that!—­an argument so repugnant as to cause her to shake with sobs of inarticulate anger.  After this he would grow bewildered, then repentant, then contrite.  In contrition—­had he known it—­he was nearest to victory.

As has been said, she did not intellectualize her reasons, but the core of her resistance was the very essence of an individuality having its roots in a self-respecting and self-controlling inheritance—­an element wanting in her sister Lise.  It must have been largely the thought of Lise, the spectacle of Lise—­often perhaps unconsciously present that dominated her conduct; yet reinforcing such an ancestral sentiment was another, environmental and more complicated, the result in our modern atmosphere of an undefined feminism apt to reveal itself in many undesirable ways, but which in reality is a logical projection of the American tradition of liberty.  To submit was not only to lose her liberty, to become a dependent, but also and inevitably, she thought, to lose Ditmar’s love....

No experience, however, is emotionally continuous, nor was their intimacy by any means wholly on this plane of conflict.  There were hours when, Ditmar’s passion leaving spent itself, they achieved comradeship, in the office and out of it; revelations for Janet when he talked of himself, relating the little incidents she found most illuminating.  And thus by degrees she was able to build up a new and truer estimate of him.  For example, she began to perceive that his life outside of his interest in the mills, instead of being the romance of privileged joys she had once imagined, had been almost as empty as her own, without either unity or direction.  Her perception was none the less keen because definite terms were wanting for its expression.  The idea of him that first had captivated her was that of an energized and focussed character controlling with a sure hand the fortunes of a great organization; of a power in the city and state, of a being who, in his leisure moments, dwelt in a delectable realm from which she was excluded.  She was still acutely conscious of his force, but what she now felt was its lack of direction—­save for the portion that drove the Chippering Mills.  The rest of it, like the river, flowed away on the line of least resistance to the sea.