to Jerry Fiske, because with a united action of all her faculties she refused utterly to consider it for an instant.  She would no more have been persuaded to see Jerry again, by a consideration of the material advantages to be gained, than she could have been persuaded to throw herself down from the housetop.  That much was settled, not by any coherent effort of her brain, but by a co-ordination of every instinct in her, by the action of her whole being, by what her life had made her.

But that certainty brought her small comfort in the blackness of the hour.  What hideous world was this in which she had walked unawares until now!  Mrs. Draper’s jaunty, bright acceptance of it affected her to moral nausea.  All the well-chosen words of her sophisticated friend were imbedded in the tissue of her brain like grains of sand in an eyeball.  She could not see for very pain.  And yet her inward vision was lurid with the beginning of understanding of the meaning of those words, lighted up as they were by her experience of the day before, now swollen in her distraught mind to the proportions of a nightmare:  “It’s a weapon in the hand of a clever woman—­it’s not so bad once you get the hang of managing it—­it’s a hold on men—­” Sylvia turned whiter and whiter at the glimpse she had had of what was meant by Mrs. Draper’s lightly evasive “it”; a comprehension of which all her “advanced” reading and study had left her mind as blankly ignorant as a little child’s.  Now it was vain to try to shut her thoughts away from Jermain.  She lived over and over the scene with him, she endured with desperate passivity the recollection of his burning lips on her bosom, his fingers pressing into her side.  Why not, if every man was like that as soon as he dared?  Why not, if that was all that men wanted of women?  Why not, if that was the sole ghastly reality which underlay the pretty-smooth surface of life?

And beyond this bleak prospect, which filled her with dreary horror, there rose glimpsed vistas which sent the shamed blood up to her face in a flood—­if every man was like that, why, so were the men she had known and loved and trusted; old Reinhardt, who seemed so simple, what had been his thoughts when he used years ago to take her on his knee—­what were his thoughts now when he bent over her to correct her mistakes on the piano?

The expression of Colonel Fiske’s eyes, as he had complimented her, brought her to her feet with a shudder—­but Colonel Fiske was an old, old man—­as old as Professor Kennedy—­

Why, perhaps Professor Kennedy—­perhaps—­she flung out her arms—­perhaps her father—­

She ran to the piano as to a refuge, meaning to drown out these maddening speculations, which were by this time tinctured with insanity; but the first chords she struck jarred on her ear like a discordant scream.  She turned away and stood looking at the floor with a darkening face, one hand at her temple.

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