ation before she went
to bed. This time, there was no doubt, she did not sleep. The more
she disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew her
self-disgust. Occasionally the mere fact of lying in bed became
unendurable, and she rolled out and marched about her room and whispered
abuse of herself--usually until she hit against some article of
furniture.

Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to herself, "Now
look here! Let me think it all out!"

For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman's
position in the world--the meagre realities of such freedom as it
permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man
under which she must labor for even a foothold in the world. She had
flung away from her father's support with the finest assumption of
personal independence. And here she was--in a mess because it had
been impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man. She had
thought--What had she thought? That this dependence of women was but
an illusion which needed only to be denied to vanish. She had denied it
with vigor, and here she was!

She did not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her
insoluble individual problem again: "What am I to do?"

She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back into Ramage's
face. But she had spent nearly half of it, and had no conception of how
such a sum could be made good again. She thought of all sorts of odd and
desperate expedients, and with passionate petulance rejected them all.

She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing insulting epithets
for herself. She got up, drew up her blind, and stared out of window at
a dawn-cold vision of chimneys for a time, and then went and sat on the
edge of her bed. What was the alternative to going home? No alternative
appeared in that darkness.

It seemed intolerable that she should go home and admit herself beaten.
She did most urgently desire to save her face in Morningside Park, and
for long hours she could think of no way of putting it that would not be
in the nature of unconditional admission of defeat.

"I'd rather go as a chorus-girl," she said.

She was not very clear about the position and duties of a chorus-girl,
but it certainly had the air of being a last desperate resort.
There sprang from that a vague hope that perhaps she might extort a
capitulation from her father by a threat to seek that position, and then
with ov