weeks thereafter the state they represented continued to pay some four
thousand dollars daily to keep its soldiers on the streets of Hampton....

In the meanwhile Janet saw much of Rolfe. Owing to his facile command of
language he was peculiarly fitted to draft those proclamations,
bombastically worded in the French style, issued and circulated by the
Strike Committee--appeals to the polyglot army to withstand the pangs of
hunger, to hold out for the terms laid down, assurances that victory was
at hand. Walking up and down the bibliotheque, his hands behind his
back, his red lips gleaming as he spoke, he dictated these documents to
Janet. In the ecstasy of this composition he had a way of shaking his
head slowly from side to side, and when she looked up she saw his eyes
burning, down at her. A dozen times a day, while she was at her other
work, he would come in and talk to her. He excited her, she was divided
between attraction and fear of him, and often she resented his easy
assumption that a tie existed between them--the more so because this
seemed to be taken for granted among certain of his associates. In their
eyes, apparently, she was Rolfe's recruit in more senses than one. It was
indeed a strange society in which she found herself, and Rolfe typified
it. He lived on the plane of the impulses and intellect, discarded as
inhibiting factors what are called moral standards, decried individual
discipline and restraint. And while she had never considered these
things, the spectacle of a philosophy--embodied in him--that frankly and
cynically threw them overboard was disconcerting. He regarded her as his
proselyte, he called her a Puritan, and he seemed more concerned that she
should shed these relics of an ancestral code than acquire the doctrines
of Sorel and Pouget. And yet association with him presented the
allurement of a dangerous adventure. Intellectually he fascinated her;
and still another motive--which she partially disguised from
herself--prevented her from repelling him. That motive had to do with