But what woman in America seeking the vote as a sure cure for injustice and corruption would listen to such a message? That, of course, was no affair of mine. My affair was clearing my own mind. So far I had only succeeded in adding to its confusion, even in destroying faiths I had held. There was the ancient faith that you could depend upon the woman to oppose violence. This woman had been one of the steadiest influences to violence, willing, even eager, to use this terrible revolutionary force, so bewildering and terrifying to me, to accomplish her ends, childishly believing herself and her friends strong enough to control it when they needed it no longer. The heaviest blow to my self-confidence so far was my loss of faith in revolution as a divine weapon. Not since I discovered the world not to have been made in six days of twenty-four hours each, had I been so intellectually and spiritually upset. I had held a revolution as a noble and sacred instrument, destroying evil and leaving men free to be wise and good and just. Now it seemed to me not something that men used, but something that used men for its own mysterious end and left behind the same relative proportion of good and evil as it started with. Never did I so realize my ignorance of life and men and society as in the summer of 1894, when I packed up the manuscript of my life of Madame Roland to take it back to America for its final revision in the peace of my home. Of course, I told myself, I would go through with it. I would put down what I had found as nearly as I could, even if I had not got what I came for. And then came the question, Can I get what I came for? Is it to be found—the real answer to my question about woman in society, the point or position where she can best serve it? Can I find an answer to this other question that has so disturbed me—the nature of revolution? Apparently, I told myself, as I packed my bag finally to go back to America, you have only begun; but at least you have a new starting point. Cheer up, make a new plan. And I was making a new plan. I had been making one for some time. It was laid down economically, professionally, and socially with as much precision as the plan with which I had come to Paris in 1891. It was a plan for my return to Paris.