urther torment. But she
was beginning to see, as her spirits tried to rise reeling from Flint's
verbal assault, the fawning submission, half admiration, half fear, that
could follow a frank, hard-fisted blow. And she had a terror, sitting
there trying to thrust food between her trembling lips, that the sheer
physical force of the male opposite her might shatter in one blow a will
that could have withstood any amount of spiritual or material attrition.
She had never seen Flint so clearly as at this moment; in fact, she had
never seen him _at all_. Formerly, he had been a conventionalized
masculine biped in a blue-serge covering who paid her salary and struck
attitudes that were symbols of predatory instincts rather than an
indication that such instincts existed. Life had, after all, been
peopled by the precisely labeled puppets of a morality play; they came
on, and declaimed, and made gestures--but they remained abstractions,
things apart from life, mere representations of the vices and virtues
they impersonated. She had entertained this idea particularly with
regard to Flint. She had felt that the day would come when he and she
would occupy the stage together. He would speak his part with a great
flourish of the hands and much high-sounding emphasis, and when he had
finished she would reply with a carefully worded retort, setting forth
the claims and rewards of virtue. Thus it would continue, argument
succeeding argument, a declamatory give and take, dignified,
passionless, theatrical.

They were occupying the stage now, it was true, but there was something
warm and human and ragged about the performance. Flint was not a mere
spiritless allegory in red-satin doublet and hose to give flame to his
conventionality. Instead, she saw sitting opposite her a ponderous,
quick-breathing, drunken male, handsome in a coarse, rough-hewn way,
speaking in the quick, clipped speech of passion and striking her to the
ground with the energy of his stage business. She was afraid, almost for
the first time in her life, with a primitive, abandoned fear. And
suddenly her vista of womanhood narrowed to include the ugly foreground
of life that youth had looked over in its eager, far-flung scanning of
the horizon beyond. Suddenly she felt all the oppression and sorrow of
the sex bear down upon her and mark her with its relentless finger.
Because she was a woman she would pay for every joy with a corresponding
sorrow; receive a blow for every c