ivity, the gradual induration of heart and soul, the
desperate and ever more desperate search for self-deceiving
extenuations, for self-blinding condonement, for pitiful and distorting
self-propitiation--in these lay the inward corruption, more implacably
and more terribly tragic than any outward blow! She had once deluded
herself with the thought that a life of crime might lose at least half
of its evil by losing all of its grossness. She had even consoled
herself with the thought that it was the offender against life who saw
deepest into life. It was but natural, she had always argued with
herself, that the thwarted consciousness, that the erring and suffering
heart, should yield deeper insight into the dark and complicated ranges
of spiritual truth than could the soul forever untried and unshaken.
The tempted and troubled heart, from its lonely towers of unhappiness,
must ever see further into the meaning of things than could those
comfortably normal and healthy souls who suffered little because they
ventured little. She had ventured much, and she had lost much. She
had thought to hold some inmost self aloof and immune. She had dreamed
that some inward irreproachability of thought, some light-hearted tact
of open conduct, might leave still untainted that deeper core of
thought and feeling which she had long thought of as conscience, while
some deceiving and sophistical transmutation of values whispered to her
adroitly that in some way all good might be bad, and that all bad might
in some way be good.

But that, she now knew, was a mockery. She was the sum of all that she
had thought and acted. She was a disillusioned and degraded and
unscrupulous woman, steeped in enormities so dark that it appalled and
sickened her even to recall them. She was only the empty and corroded
shell of a woman, all that once aspired and lived and hoped in her
eaten away by the acid currents of that underground world into which
she had fallen.

Yet rather than it should end in that slow and mean and sordid inner
tragedy of the spirit, she told herself fiercely, she would fling open
her last arsenal of passion and come to her end in some ironic blaze of
glory that would at least lend sinister radiance to a timelessly base
and sorry eclipse. So she lay back in Keenan's clasp quiescently,
unresistingly, but watchfully. For she knew that the end, whatever it
might be, was not far away.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CROWN OF IRON