n which Ditmar looked at her; and in business hours she had
continually to caution him, to keep him in check. Again, on the evening
excursions to which she consented, though they were careful to meet in
unfrequented spots, someone might easily have recognized him; and she
did not like to ponder over the number of young women in the other
offices who knew her by sight. These reflections weighed upon her,
particularly when she seemed conscious of curious glances. But what
caused her the most concern was the constantly recurring pressure to
which Ditmar himself subjected her, and which, as time went on, she
found increasingly difficult to resist. He tried to take her by storm,
and when this method failed, resorted to pleadings and supplications
even harder to deny because of the innate feminine pity she felt for
him. To recount these affairs would be a mere repetition of identical
occurrences. On their second Sunday excursion he had actually driven
her, despite her opposition, several miles on the Boston road; and her
resistance only served to inflame him the more. It seemed, afterwards,
as she sat unnerved, a miracle that she had stopped him. Then came
reproaches: she would not trust him; they could not be married at once;
she must understand that!--an argument so repugnant as to cause her
to shake with sobs of inarticulate anger. After this he would grow
bewildered, then repentant, then contrite. In contrition--had he known
it--he was nearest to victory.

As has been said, she did not intellectualize her reasons, but the core
of her resistance was the very essence of an individuality having its
roots in a self-respecting and self-controlling inheritance--an element
wanting in her sister Lise. It must have been largely the thought of
Lise, the spectacle of Lise--often perhaps unconsciously present that
dominated her conduct; yet reinforcing such an ancestral sentiment was
another, environmental and more complicated, the result in our modern
atmosphere of an undefined feminism apt to reveal itself in many
undesirable ways, but which in reality is a logical projection of
the American tradition of liberty. To submit was not only to lose her
liberty, to become a dependent, but also and inevitably, she thought, to
lose Ditmar's love....

No experience, however, is emotionally continuous, nor was their
intimacy by any means wholly on this plane of conflict. There were hours
when, Ditmar's passion leaving spent itself, they ach