her face.  Her colour was high.  The impression she conveyed of having suffered was emphasized by the simple mourning gown she wore, but the dominant note she had struck was one of dependability.  It was, after all, Insall’s dominant, too.  Insall had asked her to call again; and the reflection that she might do so was curiously comforting.  The soup kitchen in the loft, with these two presiding over it, took on something of the aspect of a sanctuary....

Insall, in some odd manner, and through the medium of that frivolous lady, had managed to reenforce certain doubts that had been stirring in Janet—­doubts of Rolfe, of the verity of the doctrine which with such abandon she had embraced.  It was Insall who, though remaining silent, just by being there seemed to have suggested her manner of dealing with Mrs. Brocklehurst.  It had, indeed, been his manner of dealing with Mrs. Brocklehurst.  Janet had somehow been using his words, his method, and thus for the first time had been compelled to look objectively on what she had deemed a part of herself.  We never know what we are, he had said, until we become something else!  He had forced her to use an argument that failed to harmonize, somehow, with Rolfe’s poetical apologetics.  Stripped of the glamour of these, was not Rolfe’s doctrine just one of taking, taking?  And when the workers were in possession of all, would not they be as badly off as Mrs. Brocklehurst or Ditmar?  Rolfe, despite the inspiring intellectual creed he professed, lacked the poise and unity that go with happiness.  He wanted things, for himself:  whereas she beheld in Insall one who seemed emancipated from possessions, whose life was so organized as to make them secondary affairs.  And she began to wonder what Insall would think of Ditmar.

These sudden flashes of tenderness for Ditmar startled and angered her.  She had experienced them before, and always had failed to account for their intrusion into a hatred she cherished.  Often, at her desk in the bibliotheque, she had surprised herself speculating upon what Ditmar might be doing at that moment; and it seemed curious, living in the same city with him, that she had not caught a glimpse of him during the strike.  More than once, moved by a perverse impulse, she had ventured of an evening down West Street toward the guard of soldiers in the hope of catching sight of him.  He had possessed her, and the memory of the wild joy of that possession, of that surrender to great strength, refused to perish.  Why, at such moments, should she glory in a strength that had destroyed her and why, when she heard him cursed as the man who stood, more than any other, in the way of the strikers victory, should she paradoxically and fiercely rejoice? why should she feel pride when she was told of the fearlessness with which he went about the streets, and her heart stop beating when she thought of the possibility of his being shot?  For these unwelcome phenomena within herself Janet could not account.  When they disturbed and frightened her, she plunged into her work with the greater zeal....