She would not consent to meet Ditmar every evening.  Yet, as the days succeeded one another, Janet was often astonished by the fact that their love remained apparently unsuspected by Mr. Price and Caldwell and others in the office.  They must have noticed, on some occasions, the manner in 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 achieved comradeship, in the office and out of it; revelations for Janet when he talked of himself, relating the little incidents she found most illuminating.  And thus by degrees she was able to build up a new and truer estimate of