'Even if I could trust you to pay the price,' she said, 'I'm not sure but what a young and ardent soul as faithful and as pure as hers—I'm not sure but I should make a poor bargain for my sex to give that up for anything you could do.'
He found his feet like a man roused out of an evil dream to some reality darker than the dream. 'In spite of your assumption, she may not be your tool,' he said.
'You are horribly afraid she is! But you are wrong. She's an instrument in stronger hands than mine. Soon my little personal influence over her will be merged in something infinitely greater. Oh, don't think it's merely I that have got hold of Jean Dunbarton.'
'Who else?'
'The New Spirit that's abroad.'
With an exclamation he turned away. And though his look branded the idea for a wild absurdity, sentinel-like he began to pace up and down a few yards from Jean's door.
'How else,' said the woman, 'should that inexperienced girl have felt the new loyalty and responded as she did?'
'"New," indeed!' he said under his breath, 'however little "loyal."'
'Loyal, above all. But no newer than electricity was when it first lit up the world. It had been there since the world began—waiting to do away with the dark. So has the thing you're fighting.'
'The thing I'm fighting'—and the violence with which he spoke was only in his face and air; he held his voice down to its lowest register—'the thing I'm fighting is nothing more than one person's hold upon a highly sensitive imagination. I consented to this interview with the hope'—he made a gesture of impotence.