She shook her head. "Not just yet. You don't realize how wonderful the drama is to me--you and Father Fontanel, playing Cassandra down in the city--the groaning mountain, and the pity of it all. I confess a little inconvenience of the weather isn't enough to drive me out. It isn't very often given to a woman to watch the operations of a destiny so big as this." The capitalist turned to Charter. "You know Empress Josephine was born in Martinique and has become a sort of patron saint for the Island. A beautiful statue of her stands in the square at Fort de France where our refugees are encamped. I was only thinking that the map of Europe and the history of France might have been altered greatly if our beloved Josephine had been gifted with a will like this--of Miss Wyndam's." Her pale, searching face regarded Charter for a second, and his eyes said plainly as words, "Don't you think you'd better consider this more seriously?" "Maybe you'll like the idea better for the evening, when the _Saragossa_ is back in the roadstead again, comparatively empty," Peter Stock added presently. "Father Fontanel and I have a lot to do in the meantime. Can you imagine our first parents occupying themselves when the first tornado was swooping down--our dear initial mother, surpassingly wind-blown, driving the geese to shelter, propping up the orchards, getting out the rain-barrels, and tightening tent-pins?" "Vividly," said Paula. "That's just how busy we are--Father Fontanel and I." It was to be expected that a sophomoric pointlessness should characterize the sayings of the two in the midst of Peter Stock's masculinity and the thrilling magnitude of the marvel each was to the other.... They were left together presently, and the search for treasure began at once: "... The present is a time of readjustment between men and women," he was saying. "It seems to me that the great mistake people make--men and women alike--is that each sex tries to raise itself by lowering the other. It hardly could be any other way just now, and at first--with woman filled with the turmoil of emerging from ages of oppression--fighting back the old and fitting to the new. But in man and woman--not in either alone--lies completion. If the two do not quite complete each other, a Third often springs from them with an increased spiritual development." "Yes," she answered, leaning forward, her chin fitted to her palms. "The _I-am_ and the _You-are-not_ will soon be put away. I like to think of it--that man and woman are together in the complete human. There is a glorious, an arch-feminine ideal in the nature of the Christ----" "Even in the ineffable courage," he added softly. "That is woman's--the finer courage that never loses its tenderness.... His Figure sometimes, as now, becomes an intimate passion to me----" "As if He were near?"