opportunity for expansion, power--everything that can
develop Betty Connor into a human product worthy of the God who made
her. But how she could fulfil herself without the collaboration of a
man, has baffled her ever since she was a girl of sixteen, when she
began to awake to the modern movement. On one side I saw women
perfectly happy in the mere savage state of wifehood and motherhood,
and not caring a hang for anything else, and on the other side women
who threw babies back into limbo and preached of nothing but
intellectual and political and economic independence. Oh, I worried
terribly about it, Majy, when I was a girl. Each side seemed to have
such a lot to say for itself. Then it dawned upon me that the only way
out of the dilemma was to combine both ideals--that of the savage woman
in skins and the lady professor in spectacles. That is what, allowing
for the difference of sex, a man does. Why shouldn't a woman? The
woman, of course, has to droop a bit more to the savage, because she
has to produce the babies and suckle them, and so forth, and a man
hasn't. That was my philosophy of life when I entered the world as a
young woman. Love came into it, of course. It was a sanctification of
the savagery. I've gone on like this," she laughed, "because I don't
want you to protest in your dear old-fashioned way against my calling
myself an independent barbarian. I am, and I glory in it. That's why,
as I was saying, I'm deeply glad that Leonard Boyce has made good. His
honour means a good deal to me--to my self-esteem. I hope," she added,
rising and coming to me with a caressing touch. "I hope you've got the
hang of the thing now."

Within myself I sincerely hoped I had. If her sentiments were just as
she analysed them, all was well. If, on the other hand, the little
demon of love for Boyce still lurked in her heart, in spite of the
marriage and widowhood, there might be trouble ahead. I remembered how
once she had called him a devil. I remembered, too, uncomfortably, the
scrap of conversation I had overheard between Boyce and herself in the
hall. She had lashed him with her scorn, and he had taken his whipping
without much show of fight. Still, a woman's love, especially that of a
lady barbarian, was a curiously complex affair, and had been known to
impel her to trample on a man one minute and the next to fall at his
feet. Now the worm she had trampled on had turned; stood erect as a
properly authenticated hero. I felt