All the books spoke of the "will to power," "the free man," "the right to live one's life," "the religion of passion," and similar things. In each pure beauty was extolled as the goal of human endeavours; in each the word "individuality" recurred numberless times in numberless connections. Each taught you to look down upon your fellow-beings with vigorous pride, and despise them as a blunted, debased, tortured and enslaved mass. In each you wandered along in blessed solitude--or in the company of a very few like-minded, noble souls--on free wind-swept mountain heights surrounded by an eternally bright ether. It was a constant offering of incense, an insatiable lashing of oneself into satiety, pleasant murder, hymn-singing rape. The main subjects invariably were intoxication, dreams, life's festivals, and ecstasy. Thus, a veil of intoxication and dreams was spread over Lilly's soul. She felt she was enveloped in a sapphire haze shot with the purple of a distant glow. She heard hot, wrathful music storming onward in discords like mænads tearing down every hindrance in their way. She felt she was climbing up perpendicular rocks, ever higher, ever higher, fighting the whole time against the dizziness which threatened to cast her back into the abyss. But she did not sink. She clung to the edge, which bruised her hands, and laughed down--laughed--laughed--at the sorry wretches there below crawling along in flocks, permitting themselves to be ground to death for their bit of daily bread. Then she felt sorry that she alone had scaled such heights, that she alone should be up there enjoying the wild, golden sunlight, while all the others little conceived that deliverance was at hand. She wanted to hold out her hand to her poor, starving brothers and sisters and draw them up after her. But they could not understand her message of salvation--he had said "message of salvation." She saw wasting faces, dank with the sweat of death; glassy eyes unable to turn from the gleaming penny, their pay. She saw pregnant bodies, swollen yet emaciated. The working woman in Richard's wrapping room recurred to her. She recalled her hands flying in feverish haste about the swaying doll. She and others recurred to Lilly, with the timid hate and the hopeless yearning in their weary eyes. Her unhappy love for the factory, which she thought had been extinguished forever on that day of shame, awoke within her again, as a quiet, painful tenderness, like the spring anticipations that tremble in us when the February snows begin to melt. This, to be sure, was hardly the sense or purpose of Dr. Salmoni's books. But they served another purpose most admirably. Her faint toothache rose to a veritable anguish. The desire for a man, any man not Richard, who understood her and swept her along with him, overwhelmed her with such force that she could only twist this way and that and feel she would perish under the lash.