s, letting many suffer and perish
and some prosper.

The anxious conservatives who are always risking their own souls in
spasms of anxiety over other people's souls would have given up Mamise
and Davidge for lost, since she lived alone and he was an unattached
bachelor. But curiously enough, their characters chaperoned them,
their jobs and ambitions excited and fatigued them, and their moods of
temptation either did not coincide or were frustrated by circumstances
and crowds.

Each knew well what it was to suffer an onset of desperate emotion, of
longing, of reckless, helpless adoration. But in office hours these
anguishes were as futile as prayers for the moon. Outside of office
hours there were other obstacles, embarrassments, interferences.

These protections and ambitions would not suffice forever, any more
than a mother's vigilance, maidenly timidity, convent walls or
_yashmaks_ will infallibly prevail. But they managed to kill a good
deal of time--and very dolefully.

Mamise was in peculiar peril now. She was beginning to feel very sorry
for herself, and even sorrier for Davidge. She remembered how cruelly
he had been bludgeoned by the news of the destruction of his first
ship, and she kept remembering the wild, sweet pangs of her sympathy,
the strange ecstasy of entering into the grief of another. She
remembered how she had seized his shoulders and how their hands had
wrestled together in a common anguish. The remembrance of that
communion came back to her in flashes of feverish demand for a renewal
of union, for a consummation of it, indeed. She was human, and nothing
human was alien to her.

Davidge had spoken of marriage--had told her that he was a candidate
for her husbandcy. She had laughed at him then, for her heart had been
full of the new wine of ambition. Like other wines, it had its morning
after when all that had been so alluring looked to be folly. Her own
loneliness told her that Davidge was lonely, and that two lonelinesses
combined would make a festival, as two negatives an affirmative.

When Davidge came back from his trip the joy in his eyes at sight of
her kindled her smoldering to flame. She would have been glad if he
had snatched her to his breast and crushed her there. She had that
womanly longing to be crushed, and he the man's to crush. But fate
provided a sentinel. Miss Gabus was looking on; the office force stood
by, and the day's work was waiting to be done.

Davidge went to his