thinkable. She would not
believe it; at the last minute his lifted arm would fail him; God
Himself would wither it; undreamed rescuers would come; the earth would
open ... _something_ would save her from this humiliation which would
kill her.

"While I count three," said King. And steadily, though there was a
pallor on his own face, which should have told her the terrible
relentlessness of his intention, he counted: "One, two, three."

She put her face into her hands and shivered, and felt the fear of one
under the flashing guillotine. She willed to move, to obey, at this
tardy second, but something within her, stronger than herself, held her
back. "_I won't!_" she screamed. The blow fell swiftly. The rope cut
through the air with vicious sibilance and fell across the stooped
shoulders. The pain was immediate, hot and searing, and Gloria
shrieked--once only--and grew still. She dropped her hands and looked at
him, her face as white as a dead girl's, her eyes as unfathomable as a
maniac's. She who had never been whipped in all of her life, she whose
soft white body had been held inviolate by idolizing parents, she who
had come to hold her own person as sacred as that of a high princess--to
be beaten by a man! To be lashed across her shoulders with a horse's
tie-rope. She, Gloria Gaynor, to have her bedding ripped off her, to be
commanded to do a man's bidding--and to be whipped!

She had known fear, blind, paralysing terror. She had suffered indignity
and experienced an insulted resentment that seared through her like a
hot iron. She had known pain, merciless bodily pain. Now she was plunged
into stupor. But that stupor was of only the fraction of a second in
duration. A flash as of white fire flared through her brain. In a soul
in torment something had happened. Something had been killed within
her--or something had been born. A blow at a man's hand had seemed to
cut through her being; it had separated body and spirit. She was
conscious of the body as though she stood apart and looked down at it.
He could beat that; he was stronger. The spirit rose above it--a spirit
bathed in floods of fire. She was in the sudden fierce grip of such
anger as kills, of such defiance as suffers death and does not yield.

"I won't go with you," she cried. "You may beat me; you may kill me if
you like, unthinkable brute that you are. I will not follow you now; I
will never follow one step ever. I have listened to you; now listen to
me!