oratories or corridors--often in
the intervals of most critical and appalling cases. She liked their
arm round her waist, the kisses as she reached back her face,
straining away, the sometimes desperate struggles. They took
unpardonable liberties. They pinched her haunches and attacked her
in unheard-of ways. Sometimes her blood really came up in the fight,
and she felt as if, with her hands, she could tear any man, any male
creature, limb from limb. A super-human, voltaic force filled her.
For a moment she surged in massive, inhuman, female strength. The
men always wilted. And invariably, when they wilted, she touched
them with a sudden gentle touch, pitying. So that she always
remained friends with them. When her curious Amazonic power left her
again, and she was just a mere woman, she made shy eyes at them once
more, and treated them with the inevitable female-to-male homage.

The men liked her. They cocked their eyes at her, when she was not
looking, and wondered at her. They wondered over her. They had been
beaten by her, every one of them. But they did not openly know it.
They looked at her, as if she were Woman itself, some creature not
quite personal. What they noticed, all of them, was the way her
brown hair looped over her ears. There was something chaste, and
noble, and war-like about it. The remote quality which hung about
her in the midst of her intimacies and her frequencies, nothing high
or lofty, but something given to the struggle and as yet invincible
in the struggle, made them seek her out.

They felt safe with her. They knew she would not let them down. She
would not intrigue into marriage, or try and make use of them in any
way. She didn't care about them. And so, because of her isolate
self-sufficiency in the fray, her wild, overweening backbone, they
were ready to attend on her and serve her. Headley in particular
hoped he might overcome her. He was a well-built fellow with sandy
hair and a pugnacious face. The battle-spirit was really roused in
him, and he heartily liked the woman. If he could have overcome her
he would have been mad to marry her.

With him, she summoned up all her mettle. She had never to be off
her guard for a single minute. The treacherous suddenness of his
attack--for he was treachery itself--had to be met by the voltaic
suddenness of her resistance and counter-attack. It was nothing less
than magical the way the soft, slumbering body of the woman could
leap in one jet in