“Nerve shock--_boomeranged_.” Laconically His Highness gestured toward
the soldier-soul. “Lay him out in the Revival Room. See you handle him
gently until I advise you what particular form his mistreatment is to
take. I must work out something especially effective.”
He followed to the casement, as the stalwarts carried out the victim of
his inviolate will. There he turned, as though chancing to remember the
recipient of the two nocturnal calls.
“Miss or madame, I wish you good morrow. As your--ah--friend was saying
at the moment of my interruption, remember that there isn’t much time.
Think things over.”
Dolores took the repeated advice. Through the long, vague hours of the
Avernian dawn she did think things over; thought and thought.
His Highness said she had power. Indeed, she must have power, else she
could not have flouted, even in small ways, his mastery. But hers was
not the power for sin which he ascribed to her. Long ago a brilliant
lawyer had toasted it as “truth.” Before that she herself had called it
“sincerity.” She knew before trying that she should fail at the task
of rousing the worst in women, when their best had been her Earth-life
ideal.
Since nothing in all the universe was meant to be wasted--not a throb
of heart or thought of mind--why had she been given power? To lose it
in the chaos of disappointment into which she had sunk after realizing
that John Cabot was not to come to her--that the sentences for the
same crime in man and his woman were not necessarily the same? She
had been anticipating Hell. Although the time before That Day might
be short, she might yet earn progression; perhaps might go to John,
since he had not come to her. Suppose she had the right with everyman
to draw upon the exhaustless supply of strength which they claimed was
God---- Suppose she could possess more and still more of this power of
sincerity----
Stronger than the gleams of the up-rising electric sun grew her
determination; brighter her hope; realer her faith. The Rex of
Reversals did not know everything, else would he have realized ere this
that he could not conquer her. And he _had_ some sort of weakness for
her. Otherwise he’d have crushed her long ago. In the present emergency
she would seem to yield to him. She would match power against power,
wit against wit, subtlety against subtlety. She would take the case of
the women of the world, but take it, as had Rufus Holt that of Cabot
_versus_ Cabot, to lose. By stress of her own emotion she had learned
that only spiritual strength was necessary to communicate with Earth.
That discovery should not be wasted. Over the official wireless through
the days would she command evils. In the night-time, with only her own
yearning soul as sending station and the souls of Earth’s sad women as
receivers, would she counter-command.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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