e that some miraculous twist of sanity might yet deliver
me. I can't convey to you a tenth--a hundredth--part of the agony of
that struggle. There were times when I shrank into the farthest corner
of my darkest cellar, and prayed, as only a madman could pray, to be
spared from the unjust curse. There were times when I stood out on the
roof of my house, and defied the God I had prayed to...."

He stared straight out in front of him, a figure of unutterable
pathos--a helpless accuser of Eternal Laws.

"If I were suffering for a fault of my own, I would bear my punishment
uncomplaining. But I am innocent. I have done nothing to deserve this
torture. And there is always the thought of what I might have been--of
what I know I could have been. That is the cruelest torment of all. I
have to see sane men and women wasting every minute of their
lives--without the slightest appreciation of the value, or the
responsibilities, of reason--who might as well be mad, for all the use
they are to their fellow-creatures. And I...." He broke off. "That is
enough about myself," he said. "I want to talk about you."

He looked at her in surprise, as if noticing the alteration in her for
the first time.

"How changed you are," he said. "You have never looked like that before.
You have always been so hard. Why have you never looked like that
before?"

She was silent. She bent her head, as if ashamed of betraying herself.

"Was all that hardness ... only a cloak ... to hide yourself?"

He seized her hand tightly.

"You fool! You fool!" he cried--"to make yourself hard and unfeeling and
unnatural--to try to stamp all the heart out of your life--to blaspheme
your sex. Don't you know that a hard woman is the most terrible thing in
the world? Don't you know that while men dare to think that they have
the image of God, it is women who can really have the heart of God? And
to think that all the time you have disguised yourself, you have been
capable of looking like that."

"I have been up against the world," she said. "I have never had enough
money to be soft-hearted. No woman with feeling can get five hundred
per cent. out of her income."

"What does it matter," he returned, "if she can get five hundred per
cent. out of life?"

He still held her hand, his eyes fixed longingly on her face.

"If only I were not mad," he said, with all his sadness--"now I know
that you are really a woman...."

"Let me go," she said brokenly, withdrawing