Almost, but not quite. Lightning still escaped from earth in the form called life. Wherever there was water, it stole forth as liquid voltaic cells. It was balanced and bottled in animals, but always enough escaped to drive them.

It drove fish through the water like darts. It drove the wings of flies so fast that no eye could follow them. It flashed out in the tongues of snakes. In her own body it carried messages from her fingers to her brain at the rate of several miles a second.

Such were the thoughts that haunted her all that spring, and a dry hot spring it was. There seemed to be no more rain along the St. Mary’s than there had been the summer before along the Volga. Even in the clearing, where the grass had been lusty for a year, the ground began to look yellow. The gift of half a dozen sheep from Chase Mahan arrived, but they found little food.

The mosquitoes, which usually hold their revel for about a month along the river, failed to come. On the other hand, the mayflies, which usually lie hid in the river till July, arrived a month earlier.

Jean watched them one hot evening from her wonted seat on the Tarpeian. They had been suppressed in their shells for two years, and now burst forth for the one day of passion that should end them. Vast swarms of them hovered and hummed, seeking no food but only their random mates. The female received the fertilizing flash from the male, laid her eggs in the water, and floated dead near the dying mate. The watchful herring, themselves like flashes of living lightning, gorged themselves on dead lovers.

The electric swiftness of the whole tragedy appalled her, and yet human beings were not much slower. She herself had felt the lightning-flash when Marvin first looked into her eyes, and her mother had confessed to feeling the same thing on meeting Ambrose Rich.

She remembered one of the first things that Marvin ever said to her, about the likeness of a brain to a burglar alarm. How true she had found it! How easily she had tired of her studies and plunged into action to escape thought.

She remembered the little folks who came to her party at Christmas. Their dear little arms and legs could not stay still a minute. She wondered if the Christ-child had been like that, so full of electricity that he could not be cuddled except when asleep.

She wondered many things about the Christ, who was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin. What could that mean? Of course Jesus did not give way to the urge of anger or envy or avarice, but how strong he must have been not to have given way to the passion of love! In that sacred body there had been the same store and potency of fertilizing flashes, millions of them in comparison with the one cell which is fertilized, yet all those lightnings of his youth had been restrained.

It must be otherwise with men of her day. The unrestrained hatred shown in war must be a sign of other unrestrained passions. They who hurled rivers of lead at each other must—she stopped, remembering something that had caught her eye in a sociological journal sent for some other purpose to her father. She remembered with horror the assertion that lead deliberately produces two million abortions a year in the United States alone.

She tried to forget it. She must think of the million tons of lead that are mined every year for good and honest purposes. Men do try to be decent.

The weather continued terribly hot, and she and her father had all they could do to save their precious garden. Every evening they carried water from the fire-ditch, and saved some of the green from running back into the roots. But the farmers all lost their hay and had to cut their grain for fodder. This was what life meant—or would mean—ultimate uncertainty of food.

The fish died by the hundreds and had to be gathered up from the shore and buried. Every day she saw large perch floating by, each a lost and golden dinner. Once she saw a sturgeon, a hundred pounds of wasted food, weltering to the parching wind. But these waters had been robbed of tens of thousands of sturgeon, making this wretched swollen thing almost the sole survivor. Out west the salmon were going the same way, and the Indians who depended on salmon would have to die out.

She read in the papers that the same terrific heat was felt even in Europe. But she had no hope that such warnings would be heeded. The birth rate in all the European countries was rising rapidly. England had made a net increase even during the war, and Vienna—the hardest-hit of all the great cities—had recovered and was breeding plenty of rickety children.

Such were her inmost thoughts during that burning summer of 1921, and not one of them did she breathe aloud. In fact the more terrific the heat, the more she seemed to flourish. When she was not cooking or working in the garden, she was mostly in the water. She would swim out as near to the steamers as it was safe to go, and sometimes nearer, and from the bubbling sapphire flirt like a mermaid with the deckhands.

One luminous evening her astonished old parent saw her swim across the channel and land in Canada, half a mile away. The glass that he had used half a century since in the war now revealed her perched there upon the pier. Half an hour later she was dancing on the pier in her bathing suit with several Canadian lads and lassies. He rowed across for her and brought her home, a very bacchanal of laughter.

Curious are the freaks of lightning.