shamed, the bold winter morning
glared in upon her. She shrank from it, feeling small and frightened
like a child stripped for a bath in the ocean which it sees for the
first time.

What had come to her?... Then she recalled the delicate clinging of that
young, ardent mouth, and her own blood submerged her, pulsing in one
shamed wave from head to feet.... She would not think. She sprang from
bed and plunged into the icy water of her morning bath that was all
netted with sunbeams. She dressed without knowing that she dressed. All
the time she kept saying within herself, "What has come to me?... What
has come to me?"

She went to the window--stared up at the cloudless blue that seemed to
swim with crystal beads as she gazed.

"My God, what has happened to me?... What is this that has happened to
me?" she asked. Lacing her fingers hard together, she kept murmuring:
"What is it?... My God!... what is it?"

She felt ridiculous and abased in her own sight; but the glamour was
stealing over her again. "It is impossible ... utterly impossible!" she
kept telling herself. Yet at the bottom of it all, shining up through
darkling depths, was that fairy-gold of joy, like the gold crown on the
head of the frog in the folk tale. Recalling this old fable of her
childhood, she laughed unwillingly. It was a wry laugh, indeed. "Yes,"
she told herself, "a frog with a gold crown--that is what this craziness
amounts to.... I am ridiculous ... ridiculous...!" She looked harshly at
her reflection in the mirror. "You are ridiculous," she said to it.

But there was more than her own absurdity to think of--there was Loring.
She had to consider him. And at the mere thought of him, again came that
frantic blush submerging her. What so ravaged her was the thought that
this wild, unreal feeling could not be love. Then she had kissed him,
had let him kiss her unworthily. She felt as though falling headlong
down abysses in her own nature of which she had never dreamed. Had she,
then, a wanton streak in her? Was she of that most contemptible breed of
mature women who like to scorch themselves delicately at the fires of
youth?

This so horrified her that she dropped into a chair, feeling physically
faint. She sat there so long that Mammy Nan put her head in at the door
and said severely: "Miss Sophy, yo' coffee's gettin' corpse-cold. Dee
bell done rang twict...."

Sophy obeyed the stern voice of Mammy Nan, from the instinct of a
hectored childho