As he stood surveying the gorgeous throng he seemed to be subtlely aware of a tension, an occult strain keying to the breaking point each eager, laughing woman he looked at. The scented atmosphere was heavy with it; the rushing outpour of the violins was charged with it; it was something more than temporary excitement, more than the reckless gaiety of the moment; it was something that had become part of these women—a vast, deep-bitten restlessness possessing them soul and body. The aspiring quest for the hitherto unattainable, the headlong hunt for happiness, these were human and definite and to be comprehended: but this immense, aimless, objectless restlessness, mental or spiritual, whichever it might be, seemed totally different. It was like a blind, crab-like, purposeless, sidling migration in mass of the prehistoric female race—before it had created the male for its convenience—wandering out into and over-running the primeval wastes of the world, swarming, crawling at random—not conscious of what it desired, not knowing what it might be seeking, aware only of the imperative urge within it which set it in universal motion. Only to weary, after a few million years of subdivision and self-fertilization, and casually extemporize the sterner sex. And settle again into primeval lethargy and the somnolent inertia of automatic reproduction. Watching the golden human butterflies whirling around him swept into eddies by thunderous gusts of music, he thought, involuntarily of those filmy winged creatures that dance madly in millions and millions over northern rivers and are swept in sparkling clouds amid the rainbow spray of cataracts out into the evening splendour of annihilation. He met a pretty woman he knew—had thought that he had known once—and reddened slightly at the audacity of her Grecian raiment. Her husband—a Harvard man he had known—was with her, in eye-glasses and a Grecian helmet—Ajax the Greater, he explained. They lingered to exchange a word; she beat time to the music with sandalled foot, a feverish brilliancy in eyes and cheeks. "The whole world," said Cleland, "seems strung too tightly. I noticed it abroad, too. There’s a tension that’s bound to break; the skies of the whole earth are full of lightning. Something is going to blow up." "Hope it won’t be the stock market," said the man. "I don’t get you, Cleland—you always were literary." "He means war," said his wife, restlessly fanning her flushed cheeks. "Or suffrage. Which _do_ you mean, Mr. Cleland?" "You’ve got all you want—practically—haven’t you?" he asked. "Practically. It’s a matter of a year or so—the vote." "What will you do next?" he inquired, smiling. "Heaven knows, but we’ve simply got to keep doing something," she said. "What a ghastly bore to attain everything! If you men really love us, for goodness’ sake keep on tyrannizing over us and giving us something to fight for!"