With her white brows frowning, she sat looking at the keys of her machine. A miserable restlessness, this was, that never went away. At night she lay awake in the room she had chosen since becoming financially independent of her family. And a loneliness gnawed in her heart. It was because she loved him. "Yes, I love him," she repeated to the keys of her machine. He was not like other men. There was something intimidating about him. He had never spoken to her in a friendly tone. His eyes had never become intimate. During the five months she had been his secretary he had kept aloof. A strange, unbending man consumed with ambition. His ambition was an awesome thing. There was a directness to it. He worked day and night, always planning for something. His engagements crowded each other. She hardly knew the man. She knew only an ambition that kept pushing tirelessly forward. There had been no talk between them except business talk. And yet, somehow he had given himself to her. Despite his aloofness and the sternness of his manner, she had felt herself coming close to him, closer than to anybody else she had ever known. And men were no exciting novelty to her. They had held her hand and fumbled around with ambiguous words. They talked art, politics, women, not because they were interested in these things but because they wanted you to be interested in what they thought of them. She had kept her virginity without difficulty. The half-world of art and jobs enthused her. But it did not stampede. A practical side of her remained dubious about the groping ones she met in the studios. It was hard to pick out the real ones from the fourflushers. She had discovered this. Because the real ones didn't know they were real. Any more than the fourflushers knew they were spurious. They all gabbled and wrote, painted and gabbled, and there was no difference to them. About the men she had noticed one thing. Their egoism was the egoism of ideas. They were better than others, they thought, because of the ideas in their heads. They were excitedly snobbish about these ideas as people are snobbish about clothes. But they weren't better than others because they were they. They were always leaning on things to make them feel superior. Radicalism was a series of ideas that they picked up because they felt a superior intellectualism in them. Ruth had started thinking in this direction after listening to Levine, Doris' friend. She had felt something of the sort before. But Levine, with his almost oily pessimism, who talked always as if he were selling something, had made it clear. "The women who go in for revolt," Levine had said, "Hm, that's another story. They're not interested in egoism. Because as yet there isn't a highly developed caste system among women. They still kind of herd together as a sex and they try to impress each other only with their superior artificialities--as to who has the most doting husband, the nicest times, the most accomplished servants.