have been times when your impositions, so carelessly thrust upon
me, because you were selfish, because you knew I must accept them from
you, were almost unbearable. The touch of your thief-trained hands to
steal from everything its beauty and self-respect has galled me beyond
all endurance. My body has received its last vile grasp from you."

She stopped, appalled at his expression. She did not know, neither of
them knew, that love, the ever-changing impulse of creation within men
and women, speaks its desire through bitter scorn and abuse, when softer
words are too slow in finding their way.

He was sitting there, white, anguished, cowering under her tongue, his
whole life shaken. Her words made him feel that the thing she said was
true. He had always feared it, realizing that in a measure it was
inevitable, and his great strength was now turned against himself,
against his bitter handicap, and he was in that tremendous upheaval that
requires a rebuilding of one's faith. His belief in himself was broken.
His belief in his power was gone. Coming after weeks of thought and fear
about blindness, Claire's words tore him asunder and made him feel that
there was nothing for him but abject misery and dependence upon charity.

Instinctively, his hand went up as if to shield him from a blow, and he
murmured, "For God's sake, Claire!"

There was to come a time, later, when experience would have taught him
that there is a wild strain in the nature of human hearts which abuses
out of a desire to be conquered. He did not yet realize that he had
spoken truly when he said that this woman had hidden in her the savage
warring sexed tumult of all the struggling ages.

She saw him there, his hand up, and suddenly her emotion changed. It was
love, still love crying out for expression, but now she was all
compassion, tenderness, and fear. She read in his face what she had
done, and her heart was gray with the pain at her own failure.

Now all love for her was buried, perhaps dead, under his shattered
selfhood, slain in the wrecking earthquake that she had brought to pass
with the ardor of her passion. She had meant to sting him into taking
her in his arms and forcing her to love him, and instead--"Oh, God!" she
whispered, and slipped behind the curtain to throw herself on her bed
and weep with heart wrung by self-condemnation and loving pity for the
man whom she had clubbed with his own dread weakness. She had shattered
into chaos the