mean?" he asked.

"I mean this," she returned, and the hands that gripped her shoulders
felt her tremble through all her body. "I should not expect you to
marry a woman who was so unreasonable as to demand that you, for her
sake, should give up your loved career. And, for my part, I shall
never marry a man so unreasonable as to make the same demand of me."

He fell back a pace.

"You mean----"

"Was I not plain enough? I mean that you will never have the chance to
crush me into your iron mould, for I will never marry you."

"What!" And then: "So I'm fired, am I?" he grated out.

"Yes, for you're as narrow and as conventional as the rest of men,"
she rushed on hotly. "You never say a word so long as a woman's work
is unpleasant! It's all right for her to scrub, and wash dishes, and
wear her life away in factories. But as soon as she wants to do any
work that is pleasant and interesting and that will gain her
recognition, you cry out that she's unwomanly, unsexed, that she's
flying in the face of God! Oh, you are perfectly willing that woman,
on the one hand, should be a drudge, or on the other the pampered pet
of your one-woman harem. But I shall be neither, I tell you. Never!
Never! Never!"

They stared at one another, trembling with passion.

"And you," he said with all the fierce irony of his soul, "and you, I
suppose, will now go ahead and clear your father, expose Blake, and
perform all those other wonders you've talked so big about!"

"That's just what I am going to do!" she cried defiantly.

"And that's just what you are not!" he blazed back. "I may have
admired the woman in you--but, for those things, you have not the
smallest atom of ability. Your father's trial, your failure to get
evidence--hasn't that shown you? You are going to be a failure--a
fizzle--a fiasco! Did you hear that? A pitiable, miserable, humiliated
fiasco! And time will prove it!"

"We'll see what time will prove!" And she swept furiously past him out
of the room.

CHAPTER XX

A SPECTRE COMES TO TOWN

For many an hour Katherine's wrath continued high, and she repeated,
with clinched hands, all her invectives against the bigotry of Bruce.
He was a bully--a boor--a brute--a tyrant. He considered himself the
superman. And in pitiable truth he was only a moral coward--for his
real reason in opposing her had been that he was afraid to have
Westville say that his wife worked. And he had insulted her, for his
parting words