"I know. I was slow in learning. I learned it first through your brother. No, don't put me off with a gesture. I must speak of him. It was he who showed me the cruelty of my father's attitude toward women. He laughed over it, but he showed me." "He was never cruel." Electra seemed to be dreaming away in a sad reminiscence of his kindness. "But to promise so much, Electra, and give nothing! He implied to every one, I have no doubt, that she was his great helper, that he would have married her if he had not been set aside by his work. That was like him. He was a sponge drinking up devotion." "Yes, and he gave it back to the hungry and the thirsty and the cold." "I don't know. I do know what he absorbed. One woman did translations for him. She worked like a dog, and he paid her with one of his looks. Another--she was a titled lady--kept his suite of rooms ready for him, and when he came, treated him like a prince. And they all had this sense of intimacy with him. Each thought she was the only one. Each felt she was divided from him by hard circumstance, but she should possess him in the end." "In heaven?" asked Electra, eager for the slightest knowledge of him. "No, not in heaven. My father always said his expectations stopped here. He never carried the game on there." "The great souls"--Electra began, and stopped. Trouble was upon her brow. She knew there was a goodly reason for every act he did, yet human jealousy was in her. She had to seek out arguments. "The great souls are different," she halted. "They are many-sided. Look at Goethe--" But Rose had heard that reason. She was tired of it. "It's a pity they make it so hard for other people," she said wearily. "Because they are great, must they be greedy, too? But that was my father. He may have been a great man, but he was not the man you think him. If you saw him as he was,--he was a big, dominating animal, that's all." Electra sat staring at her, condemning, Rose knew, not Markham MacLeod, but his daughter. The charm of his mastery was still upon her. Rose and Peter, more mobile than she, had escaped with the cutting of his cord of life. It was as if they had been under a crude natural magnetism, and now that the magician had gone into another room, they were free. But Electra had petrified in the attitude where he had left her. She had a pitying certainty that Rose had never known him. Something like indignation came now into her face. She spoke passionately:-- "Why do you want to take it away from me?" Rose could not answer. Tears were in her eyes from pure pity at the loss and pain of it all. "We knew each other so short a time," brooded Electra; and it was apparent that she believed the relation had been as much to MacLeod as to her. "Why can't you let me have the comfort of it?"