She had been busy at her machine when Joan had entered; and a pile of delicate white work lay folded on a chair beside her. “I can’t if I’m ill,” retorted Joan. “Besides, I am helping him. There are other ways of helping people than by wasting their time talking to them.”!

Again he looked at her with that odd, inquisitive expression. “She never got over it?” he asked. “Yes, but didn’t they all feel it,” Madge suggested. She still seemed to be arguing with herself rather than with Joan. “Nietzsche. I have been reading him. They are forming a Nietzsche Society to give lectures about him—propagate him over here. Eleanor’s in it up to the neck. It seems to me awful. Every fibre in my being revolts against him. Yet they’re all cocksure that he is the coming prophet. He must have convinced himself that he is serving God. If I were a fighter I should feel I was serving God trying to down Him. How do I know which of us is right? Torquemada—Calvin,” she went on, without giving Joan the chance of a reply. “It’s easy enough to see they were wrong now. But at the time millions of people believed in them—felt it was God’s voice speaking through them. Joan of Arc! Fancy dying to put a thing like that upon a throne. It would be funny if it wasn’t so tragic. You can say she drove out the English—saved France. But for what? The Bartholomew massacres. The ruin of the Palatinate by Louis XIV. The horrors of the French Revolution, ending with Napoleon and all the misery and degeneracy that he bequeathed to Europe. History might have worked itself out so much better if the poor child had left it alone and minded her sheep.”

“Thanks,” he answered. “I may ask you to later on. But just now—” He paused. “I did not know that you had been an actor,” she answered. Joan replaced the letter in its envelope, and laid it down upon the desk. Unconsciously a smile played about her lips.