The Wisdom of Father Brown

burned out and she did not dare draw the curtains apart: it was too near the dawn. She had no idea what time it wa

, on his side, his arms relaxed but slightly curved. In a few moments she went down the hall to her bedroom and took a cold bath and made a cup of strong coffee; then dre

ad been falling asleep! She had offered him wine, meaning to drug it, but he had refused l

he man who was more to her than Germany and all its enslaved women and men. He knew nothing of her plans, had not a suspicion of the revolution, but he had vowed they never should be parted a

who doled half-measures neither to herself nor others, had dismissed the morrow and yielded herself to the joy of the future as of the present. What she had felt for this man in her early twenties seemed a mere partnership of romance and sentim

ght. Were it not for this history of her own making they would find every phase of happiness in each other as long as they both live

d only be sure that he would sleep until Munich herself awoke him. But he had told her th

house and renewed his love-making, her response wo

eek for rest. For the same reason she dared not awaken him and ask him to go. He would refuse, for it was no time to slip out of a woman's apartment; far better

gloried in her submission; gloried in it still. A commonplace woman would have been satisfied, satiated, felt free for the moment, turned with rel

with the ebb and flow of mortals. But great brains are fed by stormy souls, and in the souls of women there is an element of weakness, unknown, save in a few notable in

llow her; there was the dire possibility that he would learn too much before the terrific drama of the revolution opened, and manage to thwart their plans. He was a man of

on the field of honor, a bound prisoner in a woman's bedroom while his class was blown to atoms, and his caste was roaring its impotent fury to a napping Gott!... Oh, an insufferable affront to a man of his order who held even the dearest woman as the fav

fter all, only its first. There is a

leaders for months, possibly years, to come. All revolutions

orrow if this man found her ... one soft moment ... when she needed all her energy, her fire, her powers of concentration, of depersonalization, for the millions of tortu

No matter what her defection at this moment the revolution would begin at dawn; but although Germany happily lacked the disintegrating forces of Russia, comfortable as she had been for

, and according to program. Not only were the men under surveillance, but where women would be pardoned in case of a failure, they would be shot. And most of them had mo

but if she betrayed them, proved herself the merest woman of them all-a childless woman at that-the v

r a moment her i

her ... even eternal love ... must be episodical. Life forces the duties of leadership on such women whether they resent them or not. They must take their love w

of the Socialists; until some one man (she knew of none) or some group of men became strong enough to control its destinies. The women must stand firm, a solid cri

onsciousness; her imagination would drift incessantly from the vital work in hand to the hour of

rising obsession-personifying love and completion as he did-before wh

ot he have come back into

any woman's will as long as the man be accessible. And the strongest and the proudest woman t

the past, when she had let her will relax, ignored her duties, floated idly with the tide; the sensation of panic with which she had recaptured at a bound the ideals that governed her life. Mortal happines

ulness. It was a

she had made herself over from the quintessential lover into one of the intellectual leaders of the world, a woman who had accomplished what no man had dared to attempt, and who, if the revolution were the finality w

n of genius, the custodian of peculiar gifts, sleeping throughout the ages, perhaps, like Brunhild

r herself. He looked a very gallant gentleman as he lay there, and he had been a very brave soldier. His own place was secure in the annals o

a swift hard propulsion drove it into his heart to the guard. He gave a long expiring sigh and lay still. A gallant gentleman, a brave so