“I want your love,” she said to him one day. “It helps me. I used to think it was selfish of me to take it, knowing I could never return it—not that love. But I no longer feel that now. Your love seems to me a fountain from which I can drink without hurting you.” “Thanks,” said Joan. “I have heard of it.”!

“How did you come across them?” she asked. “The articles, I mean. Did Flo give them to you?” In answer the tears sprang to Joan’s eyes. She knelt down and put her arms about the woman.

“I may,” answered Joan. “Just to spank it, and put it down again. I’m rather a believer in temptation—the struggle for existence. I only want to make it a finer existence, more worth the struggle, in which the best man shall rise to the top. Your ‘universal security’—that will be the last act of the human drama, the cue for ringing down the curtain.” “And don’t you take any notice of me,” further explained the good woman, “when I seem to be in opposition, like. I chip in now and then on purpose, just to keep the ball rolling. It stirs him up, a bit of contradictoriness. You have to live with a man before you understand him.” “Tell me,” he said. There was a note of fierce exultation in his voice. “I’ll promise never to speak of it again. If I had been a free man, could I have won you?”