'Loyal, above all. But no newer than electricity was when it first lit up the world. It had been there since the world began--waiting to do away with the dark. _So has the thing you're fighting._' 'The thing I'm fighting'--and the violence with which he spoke was only in his face and air; he held his voice down to its lowest register--'the thing I'm fighting is nothing more than one person's hold upon a highly sensitive imagination. I consented to this interview with the hope'--he made a gesture of impotence. 'It only remains for me to show her that your true motive is revenge.' 'Once say that to her, and you are lost.' He stole an uneasy look at the woman out of a face that had grown haggard. 'If you were fighting for that girl only against me, you'd win,' she said. 'It isn't so--and you will fail. The influence that has hold of her is in the very air. No soul knows where it comes from, except that it comes from the higher sources of civilization.' 'I see the origin of it before my eyes!' 'As little as you see the beginnings of life. This is like the other mysterious forces of Mother Earth. No warning given--no sign. A night wind passes over the brown land, and in the morning the fields are green.' His look was the look of one who sees happiness slipping away. 'Or it passes over gardens like a frost,' he said, 'and the flowers die.' 'I know that is what men fear. It even seems as if it must be through fear that your enlightenment will come. The strangest things make you men afraid! That's why I see a value in Jean Dunbarton far beyond her fortune.' He looked at her dully. 'More than any other girl I know--if I keep her from you, that gentle, inflexible creature could rouse in men the old half-superstitious fear----' 'Fear! Are you mad?' 'Mad!' she echoed. 'Unsexed'--those are the words to-day. In the Middle Ages men cried out 'Witch!' and burnt her--the woman who served no man's bed or board. 'You want to make the poor child believe----' 'She sees for herself we've come to a place where we find there's a value in women apart from the value men see in them. You teach us not to look to you for some of the things we need most. If women must be freed by women, we have need of such as----' Her eyes went to the door that Stonor still had an air of guarding. 'Who knows--she may be the new Joan of Arc.' He paused, and for that moment he seemed as bankrupt in denunciation as he was in hope. This personal application of the new heresy found him merely aghast, with no words but 'That _she_ should be the sacrifice!' 'You have taught us to look very calmly on the sacrifice of women,' was the ruthless answer. 'Men tell us in every tongue, it's "a necessary evil."' He stood still a moment, staring at the ground. 'One girl's happiness--against a thing nobler than happiness for thousands--who can hesitate? _Not Jean._'