“Don’t drag me back,” she whispered. “It’s all finished.” She raised herself up and put her arms about Joan’s neck. “It was hard at first, and I hated you. And then it came to me that this was what I had been wanting to do, all my life—something to help him, that nobody else could do. Don’t take it from me.” “I was going to buy you a present,” he grumbled. “But you wouldn’t let me get up.”!

“So I do,” Joan defended herself. “I’m in and out there till I’m sick of the hideous place. You haven’t seen the inside. And his wife knows all about it, and is only too glad.” Joan had taken a liking to the girl. It was a spiritual, vivacious face with frank eyes and a firm mouth; and the voice was low and strong.

A fierce anger blazed up in her brain. Why should she listen? Why had reason been given to us if we were not to use it—weigh good and evil in the balance and decide for ourselves where lay the nobler gain? Were we to be led hither and thither like blind children? What was right—what wrong, but what our own God-given judgment told us? Was it wrong of the woman to perform this act of self-renunciation, yielding up all things to love? No, it was great—heroic of her. It would be her cross of victory, her crown. “Some men,” he answered. “Artists and poets. They have the woman within them. Men like myself—the mere fighter: we are incomplete in ourselves. Male and female created He them. We are lost without our mate.” “There wasn’t much difference, so far as I could see, between them and most of us,” answered the little old lady. “You’re not married, dear,” she continued, glancing at Joan’s ungloved hand, “but people must have a deal of patience when they have to live with us for twenty-four hours a day. You see, little things we do and say without thinking, and little ways we have that we do not notice ourselves, may all the time be irritating to other people.”