Ruth's in fact was the problem of the unconquered woman--a problem at least as common among married women who have sought absorption and found only dissatisfaction as amongst the unmarried. Royal had seized her imagination for a moment; to Ernie she had submitted. But that complete immersion in a man and his work which is for a full woman love, she had never experienced, and longed to experience. After five years of marriage Ernie was still outside her, an accretion, a circumstance, a part of her environment, necessary perhaps as her clothes, but little more: for there was no purpose in his life. And then just at the moment her lack was making itself most felt, the Man had come--a real man too, with a work; a pioneer, marching a-head, axe in hand, hewing a path-way through the Forest, and calling to her with ever increasing insistency to come out to him and aid him in his enterprise. But always as she fingered in her dreams the bolts of the gate that, once opened, would leave her face to face with the importunate adventurer, there came swarming about her, unloosing her fingers as they closed upon the bolts, the children. And as one or other of them stirred or called out in sleep in the room above her, she would start, wake, and shake herself. Yet even the pull of the children was not entirely in one direction. There were four of them now; and they were growing, while Ernie's wages were standing still. That was one of the insistent factors of the situation. Were they too to be starved? Often in her dim kitchen she asked herself that question. For if in her dreams she was always the mate of a man, she was in fact, and before all things, the mother of children. Who then was to save them and her?--Ernie? who was now little more than a shadow, an irritating shadow, wavering in the background of her life? If so, God help them all.... One evening she was in the little back-yard taking down the washing, when she heard a man enter the kitchen. She paid no heed. If it was Joe he could wait; if it was Ernie she needn't bother. Then she heard a second man enter, and instantly a male voice, harsh with challenge. She went in hastily. There was nobody in the kitchen; but Ern was standing at the outer door. His back was to her, but she detected instantly in the hunch of his shoulders a rare combativeness. "You know me," he was growling to somebody outside. "None of it now!" He turned slowly, a dark look in his face which did not lighten when he saw her. "Who was it, Ern?" she asked. "Alf," he answered curtly. That night as he sat opposite her she observed him warily as she worked and put to herself an astonishing question: Was there another Ernie?--an Ernie asleep she had not succeeded in rousing? Was the instrument sound and the fault in her, the player? A chance phrase of Mrs. Trupp's now recurred to her. "There's so much in Ernie--if you can only get it out."