art," she answered, with sudden energy,
"it is all a lie--I am a lie all over, and it makes no difference
because I have ceased to care. I used to think that people only died
when they were put in coffins, but I know now that you can be dead and
yet move and walk about and even laugh and pretend to be like all the
rest--some of whom are dead also. And I didn't die slowly," she added,
with a vague impersonal interest, which impressed him as almost
delirious in its detachment, "I wasn't killed in a year, but in a
minute. One instant I was quite alive--as alive as you are now--and the
next I was as dead as if I had been buried centuries ago."

"And who is to blame for this?" he demanded, white to the lips.

"Oh, it wasn't he--it was life," she went on calmly, "he couldn't help
it, nor could I--nobody can help anything. Do you understand that?" she
asked, with the searching mental clearness which seemed always lying
behind her dazed consciousness, "that we're all drawn by wires like
puppets, and the strongest wire pulls us in the direction in which we
are meant to go? It's curious that I should never have known this before
because it has become perfectly plain to me now--there is no soul, no
aspiration, no motive for good or evil, for we're every one worked by
wires while we are pretending to move ourselves."

"All right, but it's my turn at the wire now," responded Adams, smiling.

At his words she broke out into little hard dry sobs, which had in them
none of the softness of tears. "Nobody is to blame for anything," she
repeated, still striving, in a dazed way, to be just to Kemper.

Even more than her face and her voice, this pathetic groping of her
reason, moved him into a passion of sympathy; and while he looked at
her, he resisted an impulse to gather her, in spite of her coldness,
against his breast.

"What is it, Laura, that has made you suffer like this?" he asked.

But his words made no impression upon her, perhaps because they could
not penetrate the outer husk of deadness which enveloped her.

"Do you know what it is to feel ashamed?" she demanded suddenly, "to
feel ashamed, not in a passing quiver, but in a settled state every
instant that you live? Do you know what it is to have every sensation of
your body merged into this one feeling of shame--to be ashamed with your
eyes and hands and feet as well as with your mind and heart and soul? I
could have stood anything but this," she added, pressing closer