d
wronged her, ruined her, dragged her down into the mire. One by one,
during her dark career, the long procession of men she had known had
each taken something of the good and the virtuous in her, only to leave
behind something evil in exchange. She was what they had made her. Her
soul was a bottomless gulf, black and bitter as the Dead Sea. Her heart
was a volcano, seething, turgid, full of contending fires. Her body was
a receptacle into which Benton had poured its dregs. The weight of all
the iron and stone used in the construction of the great railroad was
the burden upon her shoulders. These dark streams of humanity passing
her in the street, these beasts of men, these hairy-breasted toilers,
had found in her and her kind the strength or the incentive to endure,
to build, to go on. And one of them, stupid, selfish, merciless, a man
whom she had really loved, who could have made her better, to whom she
had gone with only hope for him and unselfish abnegation for herself--he
had put a vile interpretation upon her appeal, he had struck her before
a callous crowd, he had called her the name for which there was no
pardon from her class, a name that evoked all the furies and the powers
of hell.

"Oh, to cut him--to torture him--to burn him alive... But it would not
be enough!" she panted.

And into the mind that had been lately fixed in happy consciousness of
her power of good there flashed a thousand scintillating, corruscating
gleams of evil thought. And then came a crowning one, an inspiration
straight from hell.

"By God! I'll make of Allie Lee the thing I am! The thing he struck--the
thing he named!"

The woman in Beauty Stanton ceased to be. All that breathed, in that
hour, was what men had made her. Revenge, only a word! Murder, nothing!
Life, an implacable, inexplicable, impossible flux and reflux of
human passion! Reason, intelligence, nobility, love, womanhood,
motherhood--all the heritage of her sex--had been warped by false and
abnormal and terrible strains upon her physical and emotional life. No
tigress, no cannibal, no savage, no man, no living creature except a
woman of grace who knew how far she had fallen could have been capable
of Beauty Stanton's deadly and immutable passion to destroy. Thus life
and nature avenged her. Her hate was immeasurable. She who could have
walked naked and smiling down the streets of Benton or out upon the
barren desert to die for the man she loved had in her the inconc