squirmed a little, so that they felt all the more her warmth and
softness under their arm's pressure.
"It's no use, you know," she said, laughing rather breathless, but
looking into their eyes with a curious definite look of unchangeable
resistance. This only piqued them.
"What's no use?" they asked.
She shook her head slightly.
"It isn't any use your behaving like that with me," she said, with
the same challenging definiteness, finality: a flat negative.
"Who're you telling?" they said.
For she did not at all forbid them to "behave like that." Not in the
least. She almost encouraged them. She laughed and arched her eyes
and flirted. But her backbone became only the stronger and firmer.
Soft and supple as she was, her backbone never yielded for an
instant. It could not. She had to confess that she liked the young
doctors. They were alert, their faces were clean and bright-looking.
She liked the sort of intimacy with them, when they kissed her and
wrestled with her in the empty laboratories or corridors--often in
the intervals of most critical and appalling cases. She liked their
arm round her waist, the kisses as she reached back her face,
straining away, the sometimes desperate struggles. They took
unpardonable liberties. They pinched her haunches and attacked her
in unheard-of ways. Sometimes her blood really came up in the fight,
and she felt as if, with her hands, she could tear any man, any male
creature, limb from limb. A super-human, voltaic force filled her.
For a moment she surged in massive, inhuman, female strength. The
men always wilted. And invariably, when they wilted, she touched
them with a sudden gentle touch, pitying. So that she always
remained friends with them. When her curious Amazonic power left her
again, and she was just a mere woman, she made shy eyes at them once
more, and treated them with the inevitable female-to-male homage.
The men liked her. They cocked their eyes at her, when she was not
looking, and wondered at her. They wondered over her. They had been
beaten by her, every one of them. But they did not openly know it.
They looked at her, as if she were Woman itself, some creature not
quite personal. What they noticed, all of them, was the way her
brown hair looped over her ears. There was something chaste, and
noble, and war-like about it. The remote quality which hung about
her in the midst of her intimacies and her frequencies, nothing high
or lofty, but something given to the struggle and as yet invincible
in the struggle, made them seek her out.
They felt safe with her. They knew she would not let them down. She
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