Why, in God's name could not he have come back into her life six months
hence?
No woman should risk a sex cataclysm when she has great work to do.
Nature is too subtle for any woman's will as long as the man be
accessible. And the strongest and the proudest woman that ever lived may
have her life disorganized by a man if she possess the power to charm
him.
She moved softly from the couch and walked up and down the room,
striving to visualize her manifest destiny and erect the grim ideal of
duty. Her mind, working at lightning speed, recalled moments, days, in
the past, when she had let her will relax, ignored her duties, floated
idly with the tide; the sensation of panic with which she had recaptured
at a bound the ideals that governed her life. Mortal happiness was not
for her. Duty done, with or without exaltation of spirit, would at least
keep her in tune with life, preserve her from that disintegrating horror
of soul that could end only with self-annihilation.
And end her usefulness. It was a vicious circle.
Suddenly a wave of humiliation, of insupportable shame, swept her from
sole to crown, and she returned swiftly to her post above the sleeping
man. One moment had undone the work of all those proud years during
which she had made herself over from the quintessential lover into one
of the intellectual leaders of the world, a woman who had accomplished
what no man had dared to attempt, and who, if the revolution were the
finality which before this man came had seemed to be written in the Book
of Germany, would be immortal in history.
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