before you, cut off from all the joy of life, on an
island in the Caribbean Sea, what then? (She snaps her fingers.) That
for the worst a hurricane can do!

MISTRESS FAWCETT (uneasily). Do not let us talk of personal things
to-day.

RACHAEL. I never felt more personal.

MISTRESS FAWCETT (looking at her keenly). I believe you are excited.

RACHAEL (she clinches her hands and brings them up sharply to her
breast). Excited! Call it that if you like. All my life I have longed
for the hurricane, and now I feel as if it were coming to me alone.

MISTRESS FAWCETT (evasively). I do not always understand you, Rachel.
You are a strange girl.

RACHAEL (bursting through her assumed composure). Strange? Because I
long to feel the mountain shaken, as I have been shaken through four
terrible weeks? Because I long to hear the wind roar and shriek its
derision of man, make his quaking soul forget every law he ever knew,
stamp upon him, grind him to pulp--

MISTRESS FAWCETT. Hush! What are you saying? I do not know you--"the
ice-plant of the tropics," indeed! The electricity of this hurricane has
bewitched you.

RACHAEL. That I will not deny. (She laughs.) But I do deny that I am not
myself, whether you recognize me or not. Which self that you have seen
do you think my real one? First, the dreaming girl, in love with books,
the sun, the sea, and a future that no man has written in books; then,
while my scalp is still aching from my newly turned hair, I am thrust
through the church doors into the arms of a brute. A year of dumb
horror, and I run from his house in the night, to my one friend, the
mother who--

MISTRESS FAWCETT. Not another word! I believed in him! There wasn't a
mother on St. Kitts who did not envy me. No one could have imagined--

RACHAEL. No one but a girl of sixteen, to whom no one would listen--

MISTRESS FAWCETT. I commanded you to hush.

RACHAEL. Command the hurricane! I will speak!

MISTRESS FAWCETT. Very well, speak. It may be our last hour--who knows?
(She seats herself, sets her lips, and presses her hands hard on the
handle of her crutch.)

RACHAEL. Did you think you knew me in the two years that followed, years
when I was as speechless as while in bondage to John Lavine, when I
crouched in the dark corners, fearing the light, the sound of every
man's voice? Then health again, and normal interests, but not hope--not
hope! At nineteen I had lived too long! You are sixty, and you have not
the va