“I am Marr,” he repeated.  “Now do you understand my gospel?  Understand it if you can, for you are bereft of the power that belongs of right only to the woman who is pure.  Long ago, perhaps, you might have fought me.  Who knows, you might even have conquered me?  But you have thrown yourself to the wolves, and they have torn you till you are only a skeleton.  And how can a soul dwell in a skeleton?  Your soul, your will, is as useless as that vagrant soul of Valentine, which I expelled into the air and into the night.  It can do nothing; you can do nothing either.  If I have ever feared you, and hated you because I feared you, I have fooled myself.  I have divined your thoughts.  I have known your enmity against me, and your love—­yours!—­for Julian.  But if the soul and the will of Valentine could not save Julian from my possession, how can yours?  You are an outcast of the streets!  Go back to the streets.  Live in them!  Die in them!  They are your past, your present, your future.  They are your hell, your heaven.  They are everything to you.  I tell you that you are as much of them as are the stones of the pavement that the feet of such women as you tread night after night.  And what soul can a street thing have?  What can be the will of a creature who gives herself to every man who beckons, and who follows every voice that calls?  I feared you.  I might as well have feared a shadow, an echo, a sigh of the wind, or the fall of an autumn leaf.  I might as well have feared that personal devil whom men raise up for themselves as a bogey.  Will is God!  Will is the Devil!  Will is everything!  And you—­you, having tossed your will away—­are nothing.”

He had spoken gravely, even sombrely.  On the last word he was gone.

The lady of the feathers stood alone in the ugly little room, and heard the clock of the great church close by chime the hour of midnight.  Her face was set and white under its rouge, in its frame of disordered canary-coloured hair.  Her eyes were clouded with perplexity, with horror, and with awe.  Yet she looked undaunted.  Staring at the door through which the man men still called Valentine Cresswell had vanished, she whispered: 

“It ain’t true!  It ain’t!  Nothin’ does for a woman; not when she loves a man!  Nothin’.  Nothin’.”

She fell down against the hard horsehair sofa, and stretched her arms upon it, and laid her head against them, as if she prayed.

BOOK IV—­DOCTOR LEVILLIER

CHAPTER I

THE LADY VISITS DOCTOR LEVILLIER