My passion, on the other hand, was full of incidents, and always new. The first time I ventured to kiss her neck (it makes me flush still to think of it) marks an epoch in my life; every liberty gained was an intoxication, so that it may seem in telling the story as if I gave undue place to passion. 

I don't know why, but her figure awakened in me a sort of insane curiosity. Her hands were so slim and pretty; I wanted to see her feet, and was delighted when I found them slim, too, and arched, with tiny ankles. But then she drew away from me. 

"That's mean of you, Elsie," I complained. "If you deny the one thing, you ought to give me as much as you can--please." The argument was irrefutable, but another had more weight. 

"You are perfectly beautiful, I know, but you hide yourself as if you were ugly--please let me, please. Let my eyes have pleasure, too, please." The compliment and the pleading persistence together triumphed, and sooner or later I caught a glimpse, or was permitted a glimpse of the slim round limbs. She was beautifully made, what the French would call a fausse maigre; small bones, perfectly covered, a slight lissom figure. All my senses grew quick, my blood hot; but I knew by this time that the cooler I appeared, the more unconscious, the further she would yield. 

Half an hour afterwards she pushed me from her suddenly, and rose up and went in front of the glass. 

"Look how my face is blazing, sir, and my hair is all coming down; we must not meet any more. No, I mean it. This must be the last time." 

Oh, I knew the words by heart, the terrible words which seemed to clamp my heart with fear and turn me into a blind beast rage. Whenever she felt intensely, had been made to feel against her will, she always threatened not to come again. I was always in dread of losing her, always in greatest dread when I had most nearly brought her to complete self-surrender; she seemed to avenge her own yielding on me, and, poor fool that I was, I resented this as unfair. But somehow or other before parting we nearly always made it up again; nine times out of ten through my humble submission. I am proud to think now that, at any rate, I had sense enough to know that yielding and being humble, was the only way to complete triumph over my proud, imperious beauty. 

It was very hard for me to tell whether I was winning her or not. Over a period of three months, however, I saw that I had made great advances, that what was not permitted at first was allowed to me now without question, but often from day to day the waves of her submission seemed to ebb. 

One thing was certain, I was falling more hopelessly in love with her week by week; every meeting made me more devoted to her, more and more her slave, or was it the slave of my own desire? I could not separate them; Elsie was to me desire incarnate. 

As summer came she grew prettier and prettier; the light, thin dresses moulded her; she was like a Tanagra statuette, I said to myself, as beautiful as one of the swaying figures on a Greek vase. And I carried the fragrance of her lips, and the slim roundness of her limbs with me from meeting to meeting. 

 

 

  

Chapter V 
 

MY memory now of the sequence of events is perhaps not so good as it might be; but having no wish to misstate the facts, and no power of getting at the newspapers which might vivify or perhaps distort my memory, I shall simply set down my impressions. It seems to me that about this time there was a certain slackening, both in the revolutionary current of feeling, and in the brutality of repression. A strike of streetcar employees, which occurred about this time, did not lead to anything; these employees were for the most part American, and the police never attempted to interfere with their public meetings, or to limit their freedom of speech. This wholesome respect of the police for people of their own race, naturally caused some indignation among us foreigners who had never been treated fairly by the authorities; but not much. Young men, and most of the foreign workmen were young men, are so inclined to hope, that we at once assumed that the police had learned wisdom and self-control, and that there would be no more bludgeonings, no more brutalities, and so our talks at the Lehr and Wehr Verein assumed immediately a somewhat academic tone. 

One discussion was of my making, and I recall it because it shows in what a masterly way Lingg's mind worked even when he was at every disadvantage. I had talked to him one afternoon about the Gorgias of Plato. I had always thought that the argument of Callicles about laws was the furthest throw of Plato's thought, the wisest hypothesis on the subject which had come out of antiquity. Lingg asked me to set it forth at length that evening at the meeting of the Lehr and Wehr Verein, and I consented. The argument is very simple. Socrates demolishes adversary after adversary with ease, till at length he comes to Callicles, whom Plato pictures as a sort of well-bred man of the world. Socrates as usual tries to fly away from the argument on a rhetorical statement about the sacredness of laws, the same theme which he developed later in the Crito, when he declared that the laws on this earth are but faint reflections of the eternal, divine laws which obtain throughout the universe, and throughout eternity, and which, therefore should be obeyed. Callicles throws a new light on the subject; he says that laws are merely made by the weak for their own protection. The strong man is not allowed to knock down the weak one and take away his wife or his goods, as he would do in a state of nature. The laws are a sort of sheepfold; walls put up by the weak in their own interest and for their own protection against the strong; mere class defenses which are purely selfish, and therefore have nothing whatever to do with right and wrong, and are in no sense sacred or divine. 

An interesting debate followed, but nothing of weight was said on the subject till Lingg got up. His very method of speaking had a strange individuality about it; he scarcely ever used an adjective; his sentences were made up of verbs and nouns, and the peculiar slowness with which he spoke was due to the fact that with a very large vocabulary he was resolved upon picking the right word. 

"The argument of Callicles is foolish," he said; "how can the weak make defense against the strong, the sheep against the wolves. Furthermore, laws are not for the protection of persons, primarily, as they would be if the weak made them; but for the protection of property, which is the appanage of the strong. Even in this Christian town you can knock a man down savagely, injure him for life, and go and plead excitement or rage, and pay five dollars and a quarter, and you are held to have purged the offense. But take five dollars from his person, even without injuring him, and you will probably get six months' imprisonment, and the prosecution will be conducted by the State. Laws are made for the protection of property; they are made by the strong in their own interest; the wolf wants to be assured peaceable enjoyment of his 'kill.'" 

Once again the man made a sensation; but this time Raben got up and tried to dissipate the impression. He talked the usual vapid nonsense; laws protected both the weak and the strong, and were good in themselves. He even quoted a verse of Schiller beginning-- 

"Sei im Besitz . . . ." 

--a sort of poetic rendering of the common American saying, "Possession is nine parts of the law," without seeing that Schiller was speaking ironically. No one, however, paid any attention to him or answered him, which, of course, enraged him, for he attributed our silence to a conspiracy of envy. 

I could not help asking Lingg to explain how he hoped for any improvement if it was indeed the strong who made the laws in their own interest. He answered me at once, having perhaps thought the matter over long before, for in no other way could I explain the clear precision of his statement. 

"At all times," he said, "some of the wolves have taken the side of the sheep; partly out of pity, partly out of an intimate conviction that they must first lift up the poor if they themselves would reach a higher level of existence. It even seems to me probable," he went on slowly, "that men are gradually being drawn upwards and humanized by a power working through them, for more and more of the strong are taking the part of the weak, through an inborn sense of justice and fair play. A man's work produces ten times as much now as it did before we knew how to use steam and electricity; it seems to us that the labourer has a right to a part of this extra product. And so even those who could take it all from him are inclined to leave him a little of what he has created." 

He ended up splendidly, as he often did, by appealing to the heart. "There is an intimate conviction in all of us," he said, "that justice is better than injustice, even when we seem to profit by the wrong; generosity is its own justification." 

Raben sneered; but Raben was, perhaps, the only person who sneered. Mommsen's "Cæsar" had had an extraordinary effect upon me when I read it as a boy, and when Lingg was speaking my thoughts went back at once to Cæsar. He spoke with strange authority, and with a still nobler spirit than Cæsar's; but it was the same spirit, the spirit which induced Cæsar to pass a law letting off all debtors with a payment of three-quarters of their indebtedness, and preventing their persons being sold for debt. 

It was from this time on that I began to realize how great a man Louis Lingg was. Whatever the question might be, if he spoke at all, he spoke as a master. At the end of the debate Raben came up to us and was very pleasant; he made himself particularly agreeable to Lingg; it struck me as disloyal and false of him, and it hurt me that Lingg should receive his advances, or appear to receive them, in his usual courteous way. 

When we got out of the meeting, and were on our way home together, Lingg turned to me with the question-- 

"Why do you bring that man Raben to our meetings? Are you such a friend of his?" 

I immediately put him right-- 

"Raben brought me to the meeting of the Lehr and Wehr Verein first of all. He told me he was a great friend of yours." 

"I met him," said Lingg, "only once before I saw him there with you in the meeting; he came to me as a reporter of 'The New York Herald;' I answered his questions, and that was all." 

I then told him all I knew of Raben, and something foolishly good-natured in me made me paint the man better than he was, paint him in high lights and leave out the shadows which existed, as I had already reason to know. When I think of my folly I could kill myself; if I had only told Lingg then the bare, simple truth about Raben, things might have turned out very differently; but I was foolishly, feebly optimistic, sentimentally desirous of praising the damned creature because he was a German, or I thought he was because he spoke the language--as if a viper has a nationality! And all the while Lingg's deep eyes rested on me, searching me, reading me, I am sure, rightly. 

When we got home, I went up with them as usual for half an hour's talk before going back to my rooms, when suddenly Lingg began again. 

"You regard Raben as true?" 

"Surely," I exclaimed, "he is with us, I suppose?" 

"Did you notice how he spoke tonight?" asked Lingg. (I nodded.) "I mean that jargon of American and German which he uses. Did you remark how he kept repeating two or three words, which serve him as adjectives for everything? 'Awful' is one in English, 'schaendlich--shameful' is another; he immediately translates the German epithet into English."  

I nodded my head, wondering what was coming. 

Suddenly Lingg produced a piece of paper. 

"Here is an anonymous letter I got. I do not propose to read it, but here are four lines in it, and in the four lines there is 'schaendlich--shameful' twice, and 'awful' twice. A letter denouncing you as a traitor to the cause and throwing dirt at me; the man is too malignant to be effective." 

He squeezed the letter into a small ball in his hand while he spoke, opened the stove door and threw it in. As he straightened himself he looked me full in the face. 

"Raben wrote that letter. Be on your guard against him." 

"Good God!" I cried. "What do you mean?" 

Suddenly the icy-calm seemed to break up-- 

"I mean," and again that menace was in his voice, "that he is envious of us, of all of us, of you, of me, of our good faith, of our liking for one another. Look at the thin mean face of him, the washed-out hair and eyes; something feeble and assertive in the whole creature! Let us talk of something else." 

And not one word more did he ever say on the subject. Thinking it all over, of what I had let Raben say to me about Lingg and about Ida, my cheeks blazed with shame. I could have killed the foul-tongued snake; I wish now that I had. 

All this time Ida said nothing; but her tact soon smoothed over the sore place, and brought us back to kindly feelings, though she, too, felt compelled to say that she had never liked Raben, that she felt that Raben was not with us, but against us. 

"From now on," I said, "I will take care, you may be sure." And so the matter dropped. . . . 

The lull in the political storm did not last long. Almost immediately after the events I have talked about, I think some time in March, there came a strike among the pig packers. Nine out of ten workmen in these establishments were Germans and Swedes, officered by Americans. The foremen and speeders-up, that is, were nearly all Americans, and these foremen took small part in the strike. 

The very first meeting of the foreign workmen on strike was dispersed by the police, and there was some passive resistance on the part of the strikers. The police were led by a Captain Schaack, who seemed to have modeled himself on Bonfield. These strikers were not quite ordinary workmen; they were not only young and strong; but they had learned the use of knives, and they were not minded to be clubbed by the police like sheep. Parsons threw himself into the strike with his accustomed vigour, and so did Spies. In his weekly paper, Parsons called on American workmen to stand by their foreign brothers and resist the tyranny of the employers. The fighting spirit grew in intensity from hour to hour, and the flame of revolt was no doubt fanned by "The Alarm" and "Die Arbeiter Zeitung." 

I find in reading over what I have already written that I have not differenced Parsons and Spies sufficiently, though they were in reality completely different personalities. Parsons was a man of very ordinary reading, but with really great oratorical powers; arguments to him were but occasions for rhetoric, and he made mistakes in his statements and in the sequence of his reasoning, but he had genuine enthusiasm; he believed in the Eight Hours' Bill for working-men, and a minimum wage, and all the other moderate reforms which commend themselves to the average American workman. 

Spies, on the other hand, was an idealist; far better read than Parsons and a clearer thinker, but emotional and optimistic to an extraordinary degree. He really believed in the possibility of an ordered Socialist paradise on earth, from which individual greed and acquisitiveness should be banished, and in which all men should share the good things of this world equally. Blanc's phrase was always on his lips, "To each according to his needs; from each according to his powers." 

Both Parsons and Spies were in the main unselfish, and both spent themselves and their substance freely in the cause of labour. Parsons was the more resolute character; but both of them soon became marked men, for at length that happened which from the beginning might have been foreseen. 

A meeting was called on a waste space in Packerstown, and over a thousand workmen came together. I went there out of curiosity. Lingg, I may say here, always went alone to these strike meetings. Ida told me once that he suffered so much at them that he could not bear to be seen, and perhaps that was the explanation of his solitary ways. Fielden, the Englishman, spoke first, and was cheered to the echo; the workmen knew him as a working-man and liked him; besides, he talked in a homely way, and was easy to understand. Spies spoke in German and was cheered also. The meeting was perfectly orderly when three hundred police tried to disperse it. The action was ill-advised, to say the best of it, and tyrannical; the strikers were hurting no one and interfering with no one. Without warning or reason the police tried to push their way through the crowd to the speakers; finding a sort of passive resistance and not being able to overcome it, they used their clubs savagely. One or two of the strikers, hot-heads, bared their knives, and at once the police, led on by that madman, Schaack, drew their revolvers and fired. It looked as if the police had been waiting for the opportunity. Three strikers were shot dead on the spot, and more than twenty were wounded, several of them dangerously, before the mob drew sullenly away from the horrible place. A leader, a word, and not one of the police would have escaped alive; but the leader was not there, and the word was not given, so the wrong was done, and went unpunished. 

I do not know how I reached my room that afternoon. The sight of the dead men lying stark there in the snow had excited me to madness. The picture of one man followed me like an obsession; he was wounded to death, shot through the lungs; he lifted himself up on his left hand and shook the right at the police, crying in a sort of frenzy till the spouting blood choked him-- 

"Bestie! Bestie!" ("Beasts! Beasts!") 

I can still see him wiping the bloodstained froth from his lips; I went to help him; but all he could gasp was, "Weib! Kinder! (Wife, children!)" Never shall I forger the despair in his face. I supported him gently; again and again I wiped the blood from his lips; every breath brought up a flood; his poor eyes thanked me, though he could not speak, and soon his eyes closed; flickered out, as one might say, and he lay there still enough in his own blood; "murdered," as I said to myself when I laid the poor body back; "murdered!" 

How I got home I do not know; but I told the whole story to Engel, and we sat together for hours with tears in our eyes, and rage and hate in our hearts. That night Engel came with me to the Lehr and Wehr Verein. Already every one knew what had happened; the gravity of the occurrence weighed upon all of us. One after the other we went through the saloon and took seats upstairs, saying very little. After we had almost given them up, Lingg and Ida came in. To my astonishment he moved briskly, spoke as usual, called the meeting together in his ordinary tone, and asked who would speak; evidently he knew nothing of the shooting. 

Every one seemed to look at me; it was plain that they had heard I was an eye-witness, so I got up, and read an account out of a Chicago evening paper. The paper travestied the facts. "Three or four men have been killed, and fifteen or sixteen dangerously wounded while resisting the police with knives." One policeman, it appeared, had had a cut on his arm sewn up--one policeman, that was the extent of the resistance. I added to the newspaper account a brief report of what had taken place. There had been passive resistance; but no active resistance till men were being clubbed, then I did see one or two knives drawn; but immediately, before they could be used, the police drew their revolvers and shot down unarmed men. "They were foreigners," I said, "that was why they were shot down. We Germans, who have done our share in the making of this country, are not to be allowed to live in peace in it. These men were murdered," and I took my seat, blazing with indignation and rage. 

Raben was not present at this meeting; indeed, after his somewhat futile attempt to correct Lingg about the laws, he seldom put in an appearance at any of our gatherings. I think I remember he came once for a few minutes. After I sat down Lingg got up, and made an extraordinary speech. I wish I could report it word for word as he delivered it, gravely, seriously, to those grave and serious men who were being driven to extremity. 

"Resistance to tyranny is a duty," he began. "The submission preached by Christ is the one part of His reaching which I am unable to accept. It may be that I am a pagan; but I do not believe in turning the other cheek to the smiter. I remember a phrase of Tom Paine, who was the leading spirit of the American revolution; he said that the English race would never be humanized till they had learned in England what war was, till their blood had been shed on their own hearthstones by a foreign foe. I do not believe the insolent strong will ever refrain from tyranny till they are frightened by the results of tyranny." 

Professor Schwab seemed to be thrown off his balance by Lingg's words; every one felt that there was something fateful in them; this impression was so strong that it seemed to have shaken the professor out of all self-control. He got up and made a rambling speech about the impossibility of doing anything in a democracy; the tyrant was hydra-headed; we had overthrown kings and set up the people, and King Log was worse than King Stork, so he counselled patience and education, and sat down. Lingg would not have this, and took up his speech again--  

"No one should imagine that society is able with impunity to do wrong; tout se paie--every evil is avenged; though it does look as if a large community could commit wrongs which would put an end to the existence of a smaller body . . . 

"But surely the true lesson of history is the growth of the individual as a force. Every discovery of science," he went on, with a thrill of triumph in his strong voice, "strengthens the individual. In the past he had one man's life in his hand; a single oppressor could always be killed by a single slave." The whole meeting seemed to shiver with apprehension. "But now the individual has the lives of hundreds in his hand, and some day soon he will have the lives of thousands, of a whole city, then they will cease to do wrong, the tyrants, or cease to exist." 

He had not raised his voice above the usual tone; his speech was even slower than usual, yet I remember certain of his words as if I heard him speaking now. There was an extraordinary passion in his speech, an extraordinary menace in his whole person, a flame in the deep eyes. The words of this man seemed like deeds; frightened one like deeds. 

 
Chapter VI 
 

A MORNING or two later I was surprised by a little letter from Ida Miller, in which she asked me to come and see her some morning soon, "if possible on Wednesday next; he will be out then; I want to consult with you. Say nothing to any one of this." 

What did it mean? I asked myself in wonder. What could Ida want to see me about, and why did she want to see me while Lingg was away? I puzzled any brains in vain; but the cares and anxieties of the day and hour absorbed me, and I forgot the letter for the moment; I just noted on my almanac that I was to call on her the next Wednesday at noon. 

In truth, weightier matters would have been put out of one's head by the growing excitement in the city. It really seemed to us as if the American population had gone mad--or were we perhaps misjudging the people because of the newspapers? No one could deny that the newspapers were hysterically insane; they event on whipping up the passions of their readers day after day, hour after hour. If one had not known that newspapers increase their circulation in troubled times and periods of general excitement, one could not have understood the ape-like malevolence they displayed. When they were not bragging and attributing the highest virtues to themselves, they were running down foreigners and foreign workmen as if we had been of a lower race. The fond imaginings of the journalists were the reverse of the truth, and this fact contained in itself the seed of danger. The foreigners were outnumbered six to one, and disunited by differences of race and religion and language; but whatever original political thinking was done in the town was done by them. Intellectually they were the superiors of the Americans among whom they lived. It was brute force against brains, the present and the oppressors against the dispossessed and the future. It was the intellectual honesty and clearsightedness of the foreigners which gave them strength and made them a force to be reckoned with. Day by day they won adherents among the American workmen; day by day they grew in power and influence, and the understanding of this was what maddened the authorities against them. 

It was Spies who really ended the strike, and at the same time concentrated public attention on himself, and incidentally on Parsons. He published an article in the "Arbeiter Zeitung" in German, written by a German workman, which contained almost incredible tales of dirt and filth of the pork-packing establishments. "The workers were always above their soles in blood," he wrote, "and this blood was swept off the Moors down shutes and utilized in sausages." The account was made up of such details; but it had little effect till Parsons got it translated into English, and published it in "The Alarm." I did the translation, and I went out for Parsons immediately and interviewed five or six more of the strikers, and put in their accounts, by way of corroboration. One fact which I discovered was quoted everywhere as horror's crown. It had come under my notice in one of my visits to a pork-packing establishment. As their throats were cut the pigs were plunged into a bath of very hot water in order to loosen their bristles, so that they could easily be scraped off. Thousands of pigs passed through this boiling bath daily; long before midday it was fetid, stinking with blood and excrement; but no one paid any attention; the carcasses fell into the revolting mixture and were supposed to be washed clean by the contact with nameless filth. At any rate, that was all the washing they ever got; they were hacked up at once into flitches, hams, sides, and so forth, and thrown steaming into the brine barrels, ready for sales. But even this was not the worst of the matter. Fresh water was supplied each day; but the baths themselves were only cleaned out when the accumulation of filth in the bottom and round the sides made a clearance imperatively necessary. So long as only the food suffered, and the health of the workmen, nothing was done. The baths stank for weeks in summer, and no one paid any attention to the fever-breeding filth. "Pork-packing ain't a perfumery store," was the remark of a millionaire packer, who thought the matter could be disposed of in that comforting way. 

The American newspapers could not afford to leave us this field; they, too, sent out reporters, who supplied them with other details of the way food was being prepared, sickening details, incredibly revolting, and soon the town was ringing with the scandal. The better American sheets called upon the Government to see that the inspectors did their duty and protected the consumers; but there is no doubt in my mind that the publication of the facts brought the strike to an end quicker than anything else could have done. The employers saw that it was more profitable to yield to the demands of the strikers than lose their sales through the exposure of their filthy, careless methods. 

All this led to a discussion in the Lehr and Wehr Verein, in which Lingg took the ground that the medieval laws against the adulteration of food and of many other things, would have to be brought into force again. "There is far too much individual liberty in America," was his text. "Professor Schwab has already given us the scientific reasons for it; but this freedom of the individual must be restrained, when it comes to giving us soda instead of wheat for bread, filth from the floors instead of wholesome meat. We shall have to restrain the ruthless competition in a hundred ways." 

We were all agreed that there should be a minimum wage established by the State, an eight-hour day, and even the right to work; Lingg insisted that the workman who claimed this right should be paid by the municipality or by the State the minimum wage, what he called a living wage. Government work, too, he declared, should come as little as possible into competition with work directed by the individual; Government work should be for the welfare of all--the extension of roads, afforestation of waste places, and so on. I only mention this to show the man's innate moderation and practical wisdom. 

As soon as the strike was over everyone seemed to wipe it from memory; nobody cared for the three or four people killed, or the twenty poor foreigners who had been wounded. 

On the Wednesday morning I went to Lingg's rooms. Ida met me at the door; I was quite cheerful. We talked for a few minutes the usual nothings; but all the time there was a constraint in her; she was talking, as it were, from the lips outwards, not saying what she meant; at last I faced the music. 

"What is the matter, Ida?" I asked. "Why did you send for me?" 

She looked at me at first, and did not answer; she seemed troubled, and wanted sympathy, wanted me perhaps to divine the answer; but though sympathetic, I could not guess her secret. I pressed her to tell me what was the matter. 

"Our anxieties are always greatest," I said, "when we do not talk about them. Once talked about they grow less. Tell me what it is." 

"There is nothing certain," she said; "that is, I cannot convince you that there is any imminent danger; but there is. You know Louis is against marriage; talks of it as an invention of the priesthood, a means of filling their pockets, like all the other sacraments. The other night when we came home after your account of the shooting, Louis told me that in the present state of things he was wrong; he thought we ought to get married at once." 

She looked at me with appealing eyes; her lips were trembling; I saw she was overwrought; I almost smiled; it did not appear to me to be very serious one way or the other; but she went on-- 

"It frightened me; he has not altered his opinions, not changed in any way; he was thinking of me, and wants us to be married at once. Don't you understand? At once! That is because he feels that soon he will be no longer here. Oh, Rudolph, I'm frightened half to death; I can't sleep for fear," and the sweet face quivered pitifully. 

"What do you mean?" I cried. But even while I spoke I began to fear she was right. Of course I tried to cheer her up; tried to show her that her fears were exaggerated; but I did not convince her, and bit by bit her fears infected me, began to give shape and meaning to my own vague dread. 

"Perhaps," I said to myself, "Lingg's words seem like deeds, have the weight of deeds, because they are closely related to deeds, because he means to make good. That would explain everything"; and as the conviction struck me, I shivered, and we looked at each other, a nameless fear in both our minds. 

Suddenly, as if unable to control herself any longer, or perhaps excited by my sympathy, she burst out, her long white hands accentuating her words-- 

"Oh, if you knew how I love him, and how happy I've been in his love. It's nothing to say 'I am his.' I am part of him; I feel as he feels, think as he thinks; he has given me eyes to see with, and courage to live or die with him; but not without him. If you knew where I was when he met me. Ah, what a man! I had been fooled and deserted, and didn't care what became of me, and he came and oh, at first I scarcely dared hope for his love, and he gave like a king, without counting. How kind he is and strong. . . . 

"You know men and women are much alike; we women at any rate all pretend not to feel any sex-attraction save towards the man we love; but in reality we often feel it. We love a man for instance who is quick and passionate and virile, but when we meet a man who is slow and strong and domineering our soft flesh feels the force in him, and we cannot restrain our liking. The flesh is faithless in woman as in man; though we control it better. But since I met Lingg my flesh even has been faithful to him. I desire nothing but him, my body is as loyal to him as my soul. He is my soul, the vital principle of me. I cannot live without him. I will not . . . 

"I am so happy, I hate to give it all up. I know it's vile and base of me: I ought to think of those others who suffer while we enjoy; but love is so sweet, and we are so young; we might have each other a little longer, don't you think? Or is that very selfish of me?" And the luminous, lovely, wet eyes appealed to me. I had never been so shaken. I could not say, "You are exaggerating." I could frame the words, but could not utter them. She was so sincere and so certain that she lifted me to truths. I could only look in her face with unshed tears, and nod my head. At times life is appalling--more tragic than any imagining. 

"We must trust him," I said at last. Out of my sympathy with her the words came, and at once they seemed to help her. 

"Yes, yes," she cried, "he knows how a woman loves love; he will not be hard on me, but he is very hard on himself," she added with trembling lips, "and that is the same thing." 

"Life is not gay for any of us," was all my wisdom found; "you are rarely lucky ever to have found such complete love, such perfect happiness."  

Again I had struck the right note by chance. She nodded her head, and her eyes cleared. 

"I wish I could have one day," I went on, "like the months you have had."