nd our lives preparing for another
world. Otherwise there would be no sense in the complexities of
civilizations. A man could do that much in a cave. It is merely the
diabolism of instinct that prompts the young to believe that the race is
all. Certainly love is not the only source of happiness. I have been
ecstatically happy when writing--thinking, in the fever of composition
that I was dashing out the finest thing in literature. I have been happy
under fire, or excited enough to think so. And I have felt enough
exultation with exaltation to make happiness when I have been on a
platform and carried a hostile crowd off its head and to my feet. If two
people were indescribably mated--I don't know--"

"Why not deliberately accept the doctrine that there is a purpose, even
if you are not permitted to read the riddle of life--"

"All very well, but what have politics to do with it? You may answer
that a man should lay up all the credits he can, and that he can
possibly get more by cleaning out the political trough than in any other
way. If those are my lines I suppose I shall work along them, but my
higher faculties whisper that to live this life on the intellectual
plane, fighting for your country when necessary, is the rational
existence for those that have the luck to be born to the good things of
the old civilizations. Here they don't know any better, or if they do
they can't help themselves. If that plane isn't meant to live on, why is
it there? Has a man the right deliberately to step off the high plane
upon which a long succession of circumstances have planted him--pull up
his roots and plant them in a virgin soil?"

"Perhaps it is his duty to go where he is most needed--where his riper
instincts and experience--"

"Your arguments are always good, otherwise I should not be here arguing
with you. What do you really think of love?"

She jumped with the suddeness of the attack, and then drew backward a
little, for he was leaning towards her and she felt his masculine
magnetism as she had never done before. It pulled and repelled her,
fascinated and filled her with resentment. And she was fully alive to
the romantic conditions, the wild night, the isolation, the vibrating
atmosphere. But she replied, soberly:

"I don't think about it. I buried all that--"

"Chuck it on the dust-heap! It served its purpose: women should have
some such experience in their first youth as men have others. You are
the better for it, b