d more dependent, doing the work only
in reference to the man.

But often she distrusted her own conclusions, and, no doubt, rightly so.
Her mind was yet too confused to reason calmly, soberly, and accurately.
Her distress was yet too keen, too poignant to permit her to be logical.
At one time she was almost ready to admit that she had misjudged
Bennett; that, though he had acted cruelly and unjustly, he had done
what he thought was best. His sacrifice of Ferriss was sufficient
guarantee of his sincerity. But this mistrust of herself did not affect
her feeling toward him. There were moments when she condoned his
offence; there was never an instant she did not hate him.

And this sentiment of hatred itself, independent of and apart from its
object, was distasteful and foreign to her. Never in her life had Lloyd
hated any one before. To be kind, to be gentle, to be womanly was her
second nature, and kindness, gentleness, and womanliness were qualities
that her profession only intensified and deepened. This newcomer in her
heart, this fierce, evil visitor, that goaded her and pricked and
harried her from day to day and throughout so many waking nights, that
roused the unwonted flash in her eye and drove the hot, angry blood to
her smooth, white forehead and knotted her levelled brows to a dark and
lowering frown, had entered her life and being, unsought for and
undesired. It did not belong to her world. Yet there it sat on its
usurped throne deformed and hideous, driving out all tenderness and
compunction, ruling her with a rod of iron, hardening her, embittering
her, and belittling her, making a mockery of all sweetness, fleering at
nobility and magnanimity, lowering the queen to the level of the
fishwife.

When the first shock of the catastrophe had spent its strength and Lloyd
perforce must turn again to the life she had to live, groping for its
scattered, tangled ends, piecing together again as best she might its
broken fragments, she set herself honestly to drive this hatred from her
heart. If she could not love Bennett, at least she need not hate him.
She was moved to this by no feeling of concern for Bennett. It was not a
consideration that she owed to him, but something rather that was due to
herself. Yet, try as she would, the hatred still remained. She could not
put it from her. Hurt her and contaminate her as it did, in spite of all
her best efforts, in spite of her very prayers, the evil thing abode
with her