kisses had seemed to sear and
scar. They had given her body to be burned. For this was the fulness of
his desire of her, her favor to wear in his button-hole; and his thought
stabbed at her, beneath his gallant's air, that by now he had fairly
earned it.

In the dark as it was, the memory of her moment of revelation had turned
the girl's face downward upon her pillow. How, oh how, had he come to
image her on so low a plane? How did it come to be that men should have
slighting opinions of _her_, of all people, and so slap them across
her face?...

It was the first time that such a thought of herself had ever risen
before her mind, though in a sense not the first time she had had a
pretext for it. Her painful meditations included brief note of Vivian,
the eccentric stray across her path who had once considered her
deserving of pity as a poor little thing. He, of course, was only an
unbalanced religious fanatic, whose opinions were not of the slightest
consequence to anybody, whom everybody seemed to take a dislike to at
sight (except ignorant paupers like the Cooneys), and whose ideal type
of girl would probably be some hideous dowd, a slum-worker, a Salvation
Army lassie, perhaps. Yet this man had felt sorry for her at the Beach;
he had done it again to-night.... And if he was quite out of her world
of men, was of course not a man at all as she counted men, the same
could not possibly be said of Mr. Canning, a man of her own kind in the
royal power....

The thought of herself as vulnerable and vincible to the hostile sex had
come upon the girl, fire-new, with disruptive force. It was pulling out
the pin which held her life together. For if she was a failure in the
subjugation of men, then she was a failure everywhere: this being the
supreme, indeed, you might say the only, purpose of her life....

Below in the still house, the soft-toned chimes rang two; and, almost on
the heels of that, it seemed, three. Step by step, Carlisle went back
over all her acquaintance with Canning from their first meeting; and
gave herself small glory. She had pursued him to the Beach; she had
pursued him to Willie's apartment; and on both occasions, and since, she
had used her arts to lure him into reversing the pursuit. A dozen times
she had sought to lead him, so it seemed now, further than he ever had
the slightest idea of going. Was it really a wonder that he, whose
experienced eyes observed everything, had seen in her merely his rea