Jean watched them one hot evening from her wonted seat on the Tarpeian. They had been suppressed in their shells for two years, and now burst forth for the one day of passion that should end them. Vast swarms of them hovered and hummed, seeking no food but only their random mates. The female received the fertilizing flash from the male, laid her eggs in the water, and floated dead near the dying mate. The watchful herring, themselves like flashes of living lightning, gorged themselves on dead lovers. The electric swiftness of the whole tragedy appalled her, and yet human beings were not much slower. She herself had felt the lightning-flash when Marvin first looked into her eyes, and her mother had confessed to feeling the same thing on meeting Ambrose Rich. She remembered one of the first things that Marvin ever said to her, about the likeness of a brain to a burglar alarm. How true she had found it! How easily she had tired of her studies and plunged into action to escape thought. She remembered the little folks who came to her party at Christmas. Their dear little arms and legs could not stay still a minute. She wondered if the Christ-child had been like that, so full of electricity that he could not be cuddled except when asleep. She wondered many things about the Christ, who was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. What could that mean? Of course Jesus did not give way to the urge of anger or envy or avarice, but how strong he must have been not to have given way to the passion of love! In that sacred body there had been the same store and potency of fertilizing flashes, millions of them in comparison with the one cell which is fertilized, yet all those lightnings of his youth had been restrained. It must be otherwise with men of her day. The unrestrained hatred shown in war must be a sign of other unrestrained passions. They who hurled rivers of lead at each other must—she stopped, remembering something that had caught her eye in a sociological journal sent for some other purpose to her father. She remembered with horror the assertion that lead deliberately produces two million abortions a year in the United States alone. She tried to forget it. She must think of the million tons of lead that are mined every year for good and honest purposes. Men do try to be decent. The weather continued terribly hot, and she and her father had all they could do to save their precious garden. Every evening they carried water from the fire-ditch, and saved some of the green from running back into the roots. But the farmers all lost their hay and had to cut their grain for fodder. This was what life meant—or would mean—ultimate uncertainty of food.