“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?
“The eyes of the world are fixed on the workers of Hampton! They must be true to the trust their fellows have placed in them! To-day the mill-owners, the masters, are at the end of their tether. Always unscrupulous, they have descended to the most despicable of tactics in order to deceive the public. But truth will prevail!...” Rolfe lit another cigarette, began a new sentence and broke it off. Suddenly he stood over her. “It's you!” he said. “You don't feel it, you don't help me, you're not in sympathy.”
He bent over her, his red lips gleaming through his beard, a terrible hunger in his lustrous eyes—the eyes of a soul to which self-denial was unknown. His voice was thick with uncontrolled passion, his hand was cold.
“Janet, what has happened? I love you, you must love me—I cannot believe that you do not. Come with me. We shall work together for the workers—it is all nothing without you.”
For a moment she sat still, and then a pain shot through her, a pain as sharp as a dagger thrust. She drew her hand away.
“I can't love—I can only hate,” she said.