Her radiant personality to-night quivered with the consciousness of her triumph--its strength and solid achievement. Her position as editor of _The New Era_ was secure--her salary six thousand a year. The owners of the magazine were a group of modern women leaders, rich in their own name. Each of them swore by the daring and sensational young writer, whose brilliant essays, in their opinion, were shaking the foundations of the old order of society. Alice Clark, the President of the New Era Publishing Company, had just paused and whispered: “You’re glorious to-night, my child! Every woman in America is proud of you.” Ellen lifted her graceful head in protest while she flushed with pride. “Take care you don’t hold a meeting of the Board of Directors soon and warn me to be more conservative.” “Not even if we grow as prosperous as the _Ladies’ Home Journal_!” “God save us from such a fate,” Ellen laughed. From every quarter of the big brown room admiring eyes were focused on the heroine of the evening, and from her smiling response it was easy to guess that she knew the measure of her triumph and prized it accordingly. She was conscious not only of the achievement of success from the old point of view, but the thing that stirred the depths of her being was the certainty that her mind and personality were creating a new force in the ferment of American life. The first article of her creed was that America, freed from the strangling conventions of the old civilization of Europe, must lead Humanity into new paths of glory--and woman, the last-born child of world democracy, must become the leader of this mighty movement. The dreamy inspiration of the religious fanatic crept into the brown eyes as she swept the crowd with deliberate calm. In her inner heart she knew that the calm was partly assumed. She was, in fact, looking for Randolph Field and mildly wondering why he had hidden himself in the crowd. There was a feud between them, which she would have indignantly denied had he accused her of it. Yet in her soul she knew it was there. She knew that her voluptuous body had dazzled the materialist who lived next door. It amused her to watch his vain attempts to conceal this infatuation. The certainty of her domination of this leader of modern realism was the thing which gave keenest zest to the evening. Whatever may have been the secrets of her appeal to the public imagination, there could be no sort of doubt about the secret of her appeal to Field. It was the victory of woman over man--not man in the abstract, but man the individual--strong, insolent in his strength, conscious of powers that were cruel and merciless in the struggle of sex.