ok the glass from
her, emptied nearly all the contents away into the coal-scuttle--the
first receptacle that came to his hand--and poured in the neat
spirit.

"Now drink a few sips of this," he said.

She put it to her lips, then lowered her hand again.

"You're really very kind to me," she said in gratitude.

"Kind! Not a bit. Go on--drink it."

She drank a little, obediently, and the points of light came back
again into her eyes, the colour burnt once more with a little fevered
glow in her cheeks. Then she sat up suddenly with the glass gripped
tightly in her hand.

"Oh, what a fool you must think I am," she exclaimed bitterly, "to
make a scene like this, the very first evening that you bring me to
your rooms. I am so sorry, so awfully sorry."

He looked at her in wonder. "Great heavens!" he said. "There's
nothing to be sorry about. If any one should be sorry, it ought to
be myself. I let you in for it. I suppose it is a filthy sight, when
you're not accustomed to it."

"Yes, but you must think me so weak. And I'm not weak really; I'm
very strong."

He saw part of the pathos of this, but not all of it. He did not realize
that she was pleading for herself with all the earnestness of her
soul. He had no subtlety of mind, and the fact was too subtle for
him to grasp that the whole scene which had taken place with that
other woman in his rooms upstairs was being re-enacted, but with a
different motive. That woman had fought for his money, his protection
for her future. Sally was warring against the frailty of her body
for his love. Of his selfishness, she had seen nothing. His cruelty,
that she had seen; the beast in the every-man, that she had realized
as well.

But in the components of a woman there may always be found that
unswerving subjection to the lower nature of the man. It is a passive
submission--for which we have much to be thankful--taking upon
itself in its most extreme form, no more definite expression than
the parted lips, eyes glazed with passion, and the body inert in its
total abandonment.

It is foolish, therefore, to say that man, in that lower animalism
of his nature, is alone in the supposed God-creation of his likeness
to the divinity. The very instinct itself would die out were there
not in woman the passive echo to answer to its call. Divine he may
be; in every man there is the possibility, the nucleus, of divinity;
but it has not yet shaken off the beast of the fields which blindl