of his presence. "You feel too much--that is it you are like a torch that
consumes itself in burning. But this will soon be over, we shall have
them on their knees, the capitalists, before very long, when it is known
what they have done to-day. It is too much--they have overreached
themselves with this plot of the dynamite."

"You have missed me, a little?"

"I have been busy," she said, releasing her hand and sitting down at her
desk and taking up her notebook.

"You are not well," he insisted.

"I'm all right," she replied.

He lit a cigarette and began to pace the room--his customary manner of
preparing himself for the creative mood. After a while he began to
dictate--but haltingly. He had come here from Antonelli all primed with
fervour and indignation, but it was evident that this feeling had ebbed,
that his mind refused to concentrate on what he was saying. Despite the
magnificent opportunity to flay the capitalists which their most recent
tactics afforded him, he paused, repeated himself, and began again,
glancing from time to time reproachfully, almost resentfully at Janet.
Usually, on these occasions, he was transported, almost inebriated by his
own eloquence; but now he chafed at her listlessness, he was at a loss to
account for the withdrawal of the enthusiasm he had formerly been able to
arouse. Lacking the feminine stimulus, his genius limped. For Rolfe there
had been a woman in every strike--sometimes two. What had happened,
during his absence, to alienate the most promising of all neophytes he
had ever encountered?