pulse of revenge upon the opposite sex
comparable with, but more drastic than, the resolution she had made on
hearing of Edie's disaster. She would devote her youth to "doing men
down." It was as if from the desert of the soul seared by Maurice, the
powers of the body were to sweep like a wild tribe maiming the creators
of her solitude. Maurice had stood for her as the epitome of man, and it
was to be expected that when he fell, he would involve all men in the
ruin. This hostility extended so widely that even her father was
included, and Jenny found herself brooding upon the humiliation of his
share in her origin.

This violent enmity finding its expression in physical repulsion
defeated itself, and Jenny could no longer attract victims. Moreover,
the primal instincts of sex perished in the drought of emotion; and soon
she wished for oblivion, dreading any activity of disturbance. The
desert was made, and was vast enough to circumscribe the range of her
vision with its expanse of monotony. Educated in Catholic ideals, she
would have fled to a nunnery, there coldly to languish until the fires
of divine adorations should burst from the ashes of earthly love.
Nunneries, however, were outside Jenny's set of conceptions. Death alone
would endow her with painless indifference in a perpetual serenity; but
the fear of death in one who lacked ability to regard herself from
outside was not mitigated by pictorial consolations. She could never
separate herself into audience and actor. Extinction appalled one
profoundly conscious of herself as an entity. By such a stroke she would
obliterate not merely herself, but her world as well. Suicides generally
possess the power of mental dichotomy. They kill themselves,
paradoxically, to see the effect. They are sorry for themselves, or
angry, or contemptuous: madness disintegrates their sense of personality
so that the various components run together. In a madman's huggermugger
of motives, impulses and reasons, one predominant butchers the rest for
its own gratification. Whatever abnormal conditions the shock of sorrow
had produced in Jenny's mental life, through them all she remained fully
conscious of her completeness and preserved unbroken the importance of
her personality. She could not kill herself.

The days were very long now, nor would she try to quicken them by
returning to the old life before she met Maurice. She would not with two
or three girls pass in review of the shops of O