“God is knocking at your heart, but you will not open to Him. You have filled your hearts with love of self. There is no room for Him to enter in.” “I don’t mean that it’s all their fault,” she continued. “We do all we can to attract them—the way we dress. Who was it said that to every woman every man is a potential lover. We can’t get it out of our minds. It’s there even when we don’t know it. We will never succeed in civilizing Nature.”!

“And I want him, if that’s any consolation to you,” Joan answered with a short laugh. It wasn’t much of a confession. The child was cute enough to have found that out for herself. “Only you see I can’t have him. And there’s an end of it.” One of Joan’s earliest recollections was the picture of herself standing before the high cheval glass in her mother’s dressing-room. Her clothes lay scattered far and wide, falling where she had flung them; not a shred of any kind of covering was left to her. She must have been very small, for she could remember looking up and seeing high above her head the two brass knobs by which the glass was fastened to its frame. Suddenly, out of the upper portion of the glass, there looked a scared red face. It hovered there a moment, and over it in swift succession there passed the expressions, first of petrified amazement, secondly of shocked indignation, and thirdly of righteous wrath. And then it swooped down upon her, and the image in the glass became a confusion of small naked arms and legs mingled with green cotton gloves and purple bonnet strings.

“I didn’t ask you if you liked him,” he explained to her. “I asked you if he was brainy. I’m not too sure that you like brainy men.” “He had some shares in it himself, hadn’t he?” Joan asked. Neil Singleton, after serving two years in a cholera hospital at Baghdad, had died of the flu in Dover twenty-fours hours after landing. Madge was in Palestine. She had been appointed secretary to a committee for the establishment of native schools. She expected to be there for some years, she wrote. The work was interesting, and appealed to her.