We found seats comparatively away from the noise, and she sank down for surcease from her pain; and at once it was harder to bear, for she felt as if she were being physically torn to pieces. In her breast there raged, gnawing at her, a demon of frantic desire to be allowed by life to climb with her ambition. And she thought--watching herself suffer, I noticed--of the boy with the fox at his vitals. “What shall I do? What shall I do?” she moaned; but the irregular action of her heart precluded her speaking aloud; I knew, merely, from the motion of her lips what it was she said. I had seen her like this before, although not over Nicholas. “Come!” I said at last, rising and endeavouring to pull her to her feet. “This is getting you nowhere.” She did not dare, she said, to leave her corner, for she knew that something of her emotion would show on her face. The span of life was short, the pace rapid, and what was she to do when time flew past and made her breathe in panting gasps of impatience? She felt a wish, she said, to leap from her chair and get to work at once; and she would have annihilated these people, in order to work now--work forever--if the means for murder were within her grasp. People--always people, too close to her, crowding her, cheating her of her chance! It was because she was a woman. A man would not hesitate to kick anyone out of his way. A man was ruthless. But, if a woman should dare to be ruthless, some man was always in her life to hold her down, to turn the key on her--the key of domineering masculine superiority. She began to wish that she believed in a personal Deity: a Deity would be too great to push down a creature he had made--a poor Eva would not be turned from the Paradise of her ambition. But God was a man. There had never been a supreme deity who was a woman. Always the goddess was an underling, a subservient wretch, with a crescent moon on her head while the god wore the sun. I said: “Stop that! You’re raving.” She said between tightly closed teeth: “I can’t bear it.” I asked her what it was that she could not bear. She said--admonishing herself: “Hold tight, Eva! Keep the reins! You can’t afford to go off the deep end.” She looked at me, rather piteously. “You know, Dinah, that I’ve gone off the deep end so many times?” She knew that her cold intelligence must find the way out; and with her body so shaken, she would have to put off the session with her mind. She cautioned herself--striving to guard the thing in her that was precious: “Hold tight, you awful fool!” Helplessness ran over her like ice-water. What if she lost the command of that intelligence which had always eventually seen her through? She jumped up and started running across the floor to the only man in the room.