She should never have come, in the first place—­at least she should have turned back upon the strength of Jerry’s announcement.  But she saw now, with a clearness that surprised her, that the situation had really challenged her imagination.  She had been too calm, too collected, too well-poised, full of smug over-confidence.  She had read in the current novels of the day how hysterically unsophisticated heroines conducted themselves in tight corners and she had followed their writhings with ill-concealed impatience.  She never had really put herself in their place, but she had had a vague notion that they carried on absurdly.  Her fear all evening had been not what Mr. Flint would do or say or even suggest—­she had been anxious merely to have the impending storm over, the air cleared, and her position in the office assured upon a purely business-like basis.  She had really welcomed the forced issue; for weeks her mind had been entertaining and dismissing the idea that Mr. Flint had any questionable motives in yielding Nellie Whitehead’s place to her.  With this fleeting trepidation had come the realization of her dependence, the importance her sixty-five dollars a month in the scheme of things, the compromises that she might be forced into accepting in order to insure its continuance; not definite and soul-searing compromises, it was true, but petty, irritating trucklings which wear down self-esteem.

It had been the primitive violence of Flint’s commanding, “Sit down!” to thrust the issue from the economic to the elemental.  For the first time in her life Claire was face to face with unstripped masculine brutality.  She had wondered why women of a lower order took men’s blows without striking back, without at least escaping from further torment.  But she was beginning to see, as her spirits tried to rise reeling from Flint’s verbal assault, the fawning submission, half admiration, half fear, that could follow a frank, hard-fisted blow.  And she had a terror, sitting there trying to thrust food between her trembling lips, that the sheer physical force of the male opposite her might shatter in one blow a will that could have withstood any amount of spiritual or material attrition.  She had never seen Flint so clearly as at this moment; in fact, she had never seen him at all.  Formerly, he had been a conventionalized masculine biped in a blue-serge covering who paid her salary and struck attitudes that were symbols of predatory instincts rather than an indication that such instincts existed.  Life had, after all, been peopled by the precisely labeled puppets of a morality play; they came on, and declaimed, and made gestures—­but they remained abstractions, things apart from life, mere representations of the vices and virtues they impersonated.  She had entertained this idea particularly with regard to Flint.  She had felt that the day would come when he and she would occupy the stage together.  He would speak his part with a great flourish of the hands and much high-sounding emphasis, and when he had finished she would reply with a carefully worded retort, setting forth the claims and rewards of virtue.  Thus it would continue, argument succeeding argument, a declamatory give and take, dignified, passionless, theatrical.