for an instant.
She would no more have been persuaded to see Jerry again, by a
consideration of the material advantages to be gained, than she could
have been persuaded to throw herself down from the housetop. That
much was settled, not by any coherent effort of her brain, but by a
co-ordination of every instinct in her, by the action of her whole
being, by what her life had made her.

But that certainty brought her small comfort in the blackness of the
hour. What hideous world was this in which she had walked unawares
until now! Mrs. Draper's jaunty, bright acceptance of it affected her
to moral nausea. All the well-chosen words of her sophisticated friend
were imbedded in the tissue of her brain like grains of sand in an
eyeball. She could not see for very pain. And yet her inward vision
was lurid with the beginning of understanding of the meaning of those
words, lighted up as they were by her experience of the day before,
now swollen in her distraught mind to the proportions of a nightmare:
"It's a weapon in the hand of a clever woman--it's not so bad once
you get the hang of managing it--it's a hold on men--" Sylvia turned
whiter and whiter at the glimpse she had had of what was meant by
Mrs. Draper's lightly evasive "it"; a comprehension of which all her
"advanced" reading and study had left her mind as blankly ignorant as
a little child's. Now it was vain to try to shut her thoughts away
from Jermain. She lived over and over the scene with him, she endured
with desperate passivity the recollection of his burning lips on her
bosom, his fingers pressing into her side. Why not, if every man was
like that as soon as he dared? Why not, if that was all that men
wanted of women? Why not, if that was the sole ghastly reality which
underlay the pretty-smooth surface of life?

And beyond this bleak prospect, which filled her with dreary horror,
there rose glimpsed vistas which sent the shamed blood up to her face
in a flood--if every man was like that, why, so were the men she had
known and loved and trusted; old Reinhardt, who seemed so simple,
what had been his thoughts when he used years ago to take her on his
knee--what were his thoughts now when he bent over her to correct her
mistakes on the piano?

The expression of Colonel Fiske's eyes, as he had complimented her,
brought her to her feet with a shudder--but Colonel Fiske was an old,
old man--as old as Professor Kennedy--

Why, perhaps Professor Kennedy--perhap