ooled it, but the palm of the hand was wet.
Unconscious of that, she was unaware that she could not think. A crack
on the head makes you dizzy and into her dizziness a somnolence had
entered. The somnolence dulled all the cells of the brain save one and
that one cell, vehemently active, was inciting her to some effort,
though to what she did not know.

"I must get up," she presently told herself and told it once more.

In the repetition of the words there was the effect of a spray. The
irritability of the one active cell subsided, that of the others was
aroused. Somnambulism ceased. The entire brain awoke. But the truth had
not yet fully permeated all the cerebral convolutions and the fact that
it had not, manifested itself in the melodramatic phrase which, a week
previous, Lennox had uttered, which all have uttered, all at least
before whom the unforseen has sprung.

"It is impossible!"

She got up, went to the window, looked again. There was no impossibility
there, no doubt even, or the peradventure of one. There was only the
ineluctable truth. The aproned man disclosed it. His thumbless hand had
held the book. From his mouth, in which there was a pipe, had come the
benediction. He was Dr. Grantly. That was the ineluctable truth, the
truth which already perhaps she had intercepted in the land of Beauty
and Horror.

The first sight of it had sickened. Now the physical effect had gone.
But the nausea in passing had been replaced by another sensation,
deadlier, equally human, that made her red and hot, blurred her eyes,
set her quivering, shook her, put her thoughts on fire, vitriolised her
with hate.

Nietzsche said that a woman's ability to hate is in proportion to her
inability to charm. The brute omitted to add that a woman's ability to
charm corresponds to her evolution.

There was nothing evolved about Cassy then. She had lapsed back into the
primitive. Like Armide, she could have burned the palace that enchanted
her. None the less, she did nothing. To do nothing may be very
important. The inactivity saved her. During it, the vitriol vaporised;
the hate fell by. She was still trembling, her hands were unsteady, but
the fever was departing, the crisis had passed, the primitive had slunk
back into the cellars of the subconscious, and, in the chair, to which
without knowing it she had returned, she faced it.

Without, some one knocked and, getting no answer, accepted the
invitation as most people do.

"Beg