icativeness, Lise had been
singularly secretive as to her companions, and the manner in which her
evenings were spent; and she, Janet, had grown too self-absorbed to be
curious. Lise, with her shopgirl's cynical knowledge of life and its
pitfalls and the high valuation at which she held her charms, had seemed
secure from danger; but Janet recalled her discouragement, her threat to
leave the Bagatelle. Since then there had been something furtive about
her. Now, because that odour of alcohol Lise exhaled had destroyed in
Janet the sense of exhilaration, of life on a higher plane she had begun
to feel, and filled her with degradation, she hated Lise, felt for her
sister no strain of pity. A proof, had she recognized it, that immorality
is not a matter of laws and decrees, but of individual emotions. A few
hours before she had seen nothing wrong in her relationship with Ditmar:
now she beheld him selfish, ruthless, pursuing her for one end, his own
gratification. As a man, he had become an enemy. Ditmar was like all
other men who exploited her sex without compunction, but the thought that
she was like Lise, asleep in a drunken stupor, that their cases differed
only in degree, was insupportable.

At last she fell asleep from sheer weariness, to dream she was with
Ditmar at some place in the country under spreading trees, Silliston,
perhaps--Silliston Common, cleverly disguised: nor was she quite sure,
always, that the man was Ditmar; he had a way of changing, of resembling
the man she had met in Silliston whom she had mistaken for a carpenter.
He was pleading with her, in his voice was the peculiar vibrancy that
thrilled her, that summoned some answering thing out of the depths of
her, and she felt herself yielding with a strange ecstasy in which were
mingled joy and terror. The terror was conquering the joy, and suddenly
he stood transformed before her eyes, caricatured, become a shrieking
monster from whom she sought in agony to escape.... In this paralysis of
fear she awoke, staring with wide eyes at the flickering flame of the
lamp, to a world filled with excruciating sound--the siren of the
Chippering Mill! She lay trembling with the horror of the dream-spell upon
her, still more than half convinced that the siren was Ditmar's voice,
his true expression. He was waiting to devour her. Would the sound never
end?...

Then, remembering where she was, alarmed lest her mother might come in
and find her there, she left the so