"I've seen a lot of it. It's curious that it seems to come equally to women who want to work and to women who don't. I'm sure I never wanted to earn my living, but I was forced to it. And ever so many others are, too. It's rather an awful feeling that you're in the grip of a power that sweeps your life beyond your guidance. I'm trying hard to be big enough to live in this century, but I'd have liked the last better."
"Don't you consider that there's anything voluntary in the way women are acting now?" Lorenzo asked, with real interest.
"No, I'm afraid not. I think that there's something we don't understand, or grasp, or—or quite see rightly. I believe that everything is ordered and ordered ultimately for the best, and I see the problems of to-day as surely here by God's will and to be worked out by learning the conduct of the current instead of opposing it. But still I really don't understand it all as I wish that I did."
"You really do feel God as a friend," said Lorenzo, watching her illuminated face. "He isn't just a religion to you, then?"
"He's everything to me," said Jane reverently, "Help and Sunlight and Strength and Daily Bread. That part of Him that is energy manifests in us in one way, and that part of Him that is divine right and justice manifests in us in another way. My part in this life is to learn to use them together, but they and all else are all God."
Susan rose from her seat and stood contemplating her niece and Lorenzo by turns. "To think of talking like this in my house," she said; "this is what I call real conversation. I tell you, Jane, you certainly did lift me into another life when you invited old Mrs. Croft here. Every kind of religion sinks right into me now, and I can believe without the least bother. It's wonderful, but I'm going to have a short-cake for tea, so I'll have to go."
She went away, and Lorenzo turned to the window.
There was a little pause while he wondered about many things. Finally he held out his hand abruptly. "You've gone a long way, Jane," he said, "you've got a big grip on life and its meaning, and you make me understand as I never did before how hopeless it is to wish that the wheels of time will turn backward. But whatever you may preach, you only prove what I said and what I feel, that the old-fashioned, sweet, home-keeping, winning and winnable girl is gone, only she's gone in a different way from what most people understand. When she still exists, she exists for herself—not for a man."
Jane felt her eyes fill suddenly. "Why do you say that?"
"Because you prove it. A man might adore you, but he couldn't hope to get you. Could he?"