necessity more final than hers. "Where's my last Journal of American Science?" He dismissed her intensity. Lifting his thick brows, he took out spectacles and put them on. He watched her over the rims.

She handed him his paper. He was a child to her. Her secret sense of sin made her strong and superior. She wanted to be gentle. She did not know why the sense of wrongdoing made her so confident of herself. While he read the journal she seated herself on the opposite side of the fireplace with her embroidery. When he lowered the paper for an instant and she had a glimpse of his oldish oblivious face, she loved its unawareness and tears came to her eyes again.

On Saturday morning Julia attended the meeting of a club in which the problems of business women were reviewed. The members gathered in a hotel auditorium where musicales were sometimes given. The long windows of the room opened above an alleyway and its gold rococo gloom was relieved of the obscure sunshine by electric lights. The women sat in little groups here and there, only half filling the place, and the murmur of voices went on indistinguishably until the president, Mrs. Hurst, a pale self-confident little woman with a whimsical smile, stepped to the platform, below the garlanded reliefs of Beethoven and Mozart, and struck her gavel on the desk. Then an unfinished silence crept over the scattered assemblage. A stout intellectual-looking Jewess came forward ponderously, adjusted her nose glasses, and read the minutes of the previous meeting, while those before her listened with forced attention, or frankly considered the interesting design of green and black embroidery which ornamented her dark blue dress.

But once the subjects of the day were under discussion the concentration of the audience was natural and intense. Then the president, with demure severity, rapped with her gavel and reminded too ardent debaters that they were out of order.

Julia could not resist the sense of importance that it gave her to state her serious opinion upon certain problems which affected her sex. When she rose to express herself her exposition was so succinct that she was invited to the platform where what she said could be better appreciated.

The repetition of her speech was uncomfortably self-conscious. Her cheeks grew faintly pink. There were several women in the audience whom she disliked, and when she talked in this manner she felt that she was beating them down with her righteousness. She observed in the faces of many a virtuous and deliberate stupidity that was a part of their determination not to understand her.

Her speech intoxicated her a little. When she stepped to the floor amidst small volleys of applause, the room about her grew slightly dim. For an hour the discussion went on, back and forth, one woman rising and the next interrupting her statement. After Julia herself had spoken, nothing further seemed to her of consequence. The other women were hopelessly verbose, or, if they argued against her, ridiculously unseeing. Their past applause rang irritatingly in her mind. She recalled Dudley Allen's contempt for this feeble utilitarian consideration of eternal things. She was proud of comprehending the unmorality—the moral cynicism—of art. She felt that her broad capacity for understanding men like Dudley Allen liberated her from the narrow ethical confines of the lives that surrounded her, which took their color from social usage.

Yet she resented Dudley's attitude toward her slight attempts at self-expression. It reminded her of Laurence's protective air when she first took a position under him at the laboratory. It was part of the conspiracy against her attempt at achieving significance beyond the limits of her personal problem. It hurt her as much as it pleased her when either Dudley or her husband complimented her dress or commented on the grace of her hands when she was pouring tea. Her feeling was the same when she thought of having a child. She wanted the child in everything but the sense of accepting the inevitable in maternity. She sometimes imagined that if she could bear a child that was hers alone she could be glad of it. In order to avoid being stifled by a conviction of inferiority, she was constantly demanding some assurance of dependence on her from those she was associated with.

Since childhood Dudley Allen had looked to himself to achieve greatness. He had been a pretty child, but effeminate, undersized, and not noted for cleverness. His father was a Unitarian minister in a New England town; his mother, an ambitious woman absorbed in the pursuit of culture. Her esthetic conceptions were of an intellectual order, but she sang in the choir of her husband's church and thought of herself as frustrated in the expression of a naturally artistic temperament.

Dudley remembered her with vexation. She had been ambitious for him, and he had resented her efforts to use him for vicarious self-fulfilment. She had him taught to play the violin and developed his taste for music. It was chiefly in contradiction to her suggestions that he early interested himself in paint. Now he played the violin occasionally, but never in public.

His father was a man repressed and made severe by his sense of justice. As a child Dudley knew that this parent was ashamed of his son's physical weakness and emotional explosiveness. His father wanted him to be a lawyer. His mother wished him to become a man of letters or a musician of distinction.

Dudley was reared in the sterile atmosphere of a religion which confined itself to ethical adherences. However, he absorbed Biblical lore and adapted it to his more poetic needs. His father's contempt pained him, but in no wise diminished the boy's vaguely acquired conviction that he was himself one of the chosen few. Dudley identified himself with the singers of Israel who spoke with God. As he was unable to cope with bullying playmates of his own age, his exalted isolation was his defense.

When he was twelve years old his mother discovered a journal in which he had set down some of his intimacies with the Creator. She admonished him for his absurdities and burned the book. The incident helped to develop his resistance to the opinions of those who would destroy his consoling fancies. He noted precociously symptoms of his mother's weaknesses.

By the time he was sent away to college he had developed his secret defense, and his timidity was no longer so apparent. His progress through his courses, while erratic, was in part brilliant. When he returned home after his first absence his father showed some pride in the visit.

At eighteen Dudley had evolved a philosophy which permitted him to look upon himself as a prophet. Praise irritated him as much as blame. When people made him angry he retorted to them with waspish sarcasms. When he was alone he worked himself into transports of despair which made him happy. He thought of himself as the peculiar interpreter of universal life. He liked to go out in the woods and fields alone, and under the trees to take his clothes off and roll in the grass. He was recklessly generous on occasion, in defiance of habits of penuriousness. He felt most kindly toward Negroes, day laborers, and other people whose social status was inferior to his own. Yet among his own kind he exacted every recognition of social superiority.

After vexatious arguments with his father, he went to Paris to continue the study of painting. His technical facility surprised every one. His conversations were facile and worldly, he was impeccable in his dress, while he thought of a trilogy in spirit which embraced David in Israel, Spinoza, and himself. His greatest fear in life was the fear of ridicule. The physical cowardice which had oppressed his childhood remained with him, and his escape from it was still through his religious belief in his inward significance. Men of the crasser type despised him utterly, and he confuted them with stinging cleverness. A few who were artists were attracted by the rich,