"I'm not going to come to grief," said Morrison. "I'm going to win--I'm going to win." It was then that she went out and bought the flowers. Her courage nearly failed her as she approached the door in the little slummy street. Suppose he should be angry with her for running away, and contemptuous of her cowardice! His anger and contempt were not easy things to face. She was relieved, therefore, when the dirty little Jewish servant opened the door and told her Mendel was out. She handed in the flowers shyly and went away without a word. * * * * * Mendel wrote to thank her for the flowers, but said nothing about going to see her or about what he was doing. She thought he must be contemptuous of her, though it was not like him to be so stupid as not to respond to a direct impulse. On the other hand, he had always tried to impose his authority on her, and she was not going to do his bidding. Either he must take her on her own level or not at all. She would make him understand that she too was driving at something, and that love was to her not an end in itself, much though she might desire love and its freedom. He had always made her feel that he regarded love as sufficient for her. She must curl up in it and be happy while he went on with his work. Against that all the free instinct in her cried out. A woman was not a mere embryo to be incubated in a man's passion, hatched out into a wife and a helpmate. . . . When she tried to imagine what life with him would be like, she shivered until she thought what life with him might be if she could bring to it all her force and all her freedom. At last she began to think that perhaps it was her own fault for not having left a note or a message with the flowers, which might be regarded only as a token of sentimental forgiveness. She knew how easily he was sickened by any sign of Christian sentimentality--"filthy gush" as he called it. . . . To safeguard against that and to have done with it once and for all, she wrote to him and told him that she had been reading "Jean Christophe," and that it had helped her to understand both his sufferings and his need of what in an ordinary foolish vain man would have to be condemned. To this letter he did not reply, and she determined that she would go and see him. She would take Clowes, in case things had become impossible and their sympathy had somehow been undermined and destroyed. Even if it were, she would not accept or believe it, and she would fight to restore it. A vague intuition took possession of her by which she surely knew that something strange, perhaps even terrible, was happening to him, and she felt that he needed her but did not know his need.