ter. "But I respect you more than any woman I have ever known. And
although you are not very sympathetic you are the only person on earth
to whom I could even mention such a subject."

"Well, go ahead," said Mary resignedly. "If you want my advice, take
your courage in your hands and do it. However people may carp, there
is nothing they so much admire as courage."

"Yes, but they make you suffer tortures just because they do admire
it--or to keep themselves from admitting it."

"True enough. But after all, they don't matter. Life would be so much
simpler if we'd all make up our minds that what other people think
about us does not signify in the least. It's only permitting it to
signify that permits it to exist."

"That's all very well for you, but it's really a question of
temperament. Do you think I'd dare come back here looking like a girl
again--and I suppose I should. I'm sixteen years younger than
you. . . . You must know how many of the women hate you."

"That sort of hate may be very stimulating, my dear Agnes," said Madame
Zattiany drily.

"I can understand that. But I should return to what it is hardly an
exaggeration to call a life of a thousand intimacies. The ridicule!
The contempt! The merciless criticism! I don't want to live anywhere
else. I can't face it! But, oh, I do so want it! I do so want it!"

"But just think of the compensations. No doubt you would marry
immediately. If you were happy, and with a man to protect you, how
much would you care?"

"Oh!" Once more the thin ascetic face was dyed with an unbecoming
flush. "Oh!" And then the barriers fell with a crash and she hurried
on, the words tumbling over one another, as her memory, its inhibitions
shattered, swept back into the dark vortex of her secret past. "Oh,
Mary! You don't know! You don't know! You, who've had all the men
you ever wanted. Who, they say, have a young man now. The nights of
horror I've passed. I've never slept a wink the nights our girls
married. I could have killed them. I could have killed every man I've
met for asking nothing of _me_. It seems to me that I've thought of
nothing else for twenty years. When I've been teaching, counselling
good thoughts, virtue, good conduct, to those girls down there, it's
been in the background of my mind every minute like a terrible
obsession. I wonder I haven't gone mad. Some of us old maids do go
mad. And no one knew until they raved what was th