d with
everything lovely and of good report under the sun, they will not throw
themselves and their gifts away. First, they will stand together--a
hard thing for women, whose great love pours out so eagerly to
man--stand together and demand of men, Manliness. Women will learn to
withhold themselves where manliness is not, as the flower of young
womanhood is doing to-day.... I tell you, David, woman can make of man
anything she wills--by withholding herself from him.... _Through his
desire for her_!... This is her Power. This is all in man that
electricity is in Nature--a measureless, colossal force. Mastering that
(and to woman alone is the mastery), she can light the world. Giving
away to it ignorantly, she destroys herself."

... So much was but a beginning. Their talk that night was all that the
old Luzon nights had promised, which was a great deal, indeed.... It
was not until Cairns was walking home, that he recalled his first idea
in looking in upon Bedient that night--a sort of hope that his friend
would talk about Vina Nettleton in the way Beth had suggested. "How
absurd," he thought, "that is exactly the sort of thing he would leave
for me to find out!"

SEVENTEENTH CHAPTER

THE PLAN OF THE BUILDER

New York had brought Andrew Bedient rather marvellously into his own.
He awoke each morning with a ruling thought. He lived in a state of
continual transport; he saw all that was savage in his race, and missed
little that was beautiful. Work was forming within him; he felt all the
inspiritings, all the strange pressures of his long preparation. He
realized that his thirty-three years had been full years; that all the
main exteriors of man's life had passed before him in swift review, as
a human babe in embryo takes on from time to time the forms of the
great stations of evolution. He had passed without temptation from one
to another of the vast traps which catch the multitude; nor tarried at
a single one of the poisoned oasis of sense. Mother Earth had taken him
to her breast; India had lulled his body and awakened his spirit; he
had gone up to his Sinai there.

He looked back upon the several crises in which he might have faltered,
and truly it seemed to him that he had been guided through these, by
some wiser spirit, by something of larger vision, at least, than his
own intelligence. Humility and thankfulness became resurgent at the
memory of these times. Books of beauty and wisdom had come to his hand