“Gabriella, you don’t—­you can’t—­” she repeated wildly.

Then, as Gabriella turned quickly and left the room, Mrs. Fowler rose stoically to her feet, adjusted her belt with a tremulous movement of her hands, and smiled bravely as she went to the mirror to put on her hat.  Heartbroken and distraught of mind though she was, she submitted instinctively to the lifelong tyranny of appearances.

CHAPTER II

A SECOND START IN LIFE

With deliberation Gabriella walked the length of the hall to her room, turned and locked the door after she had entered, and took off her hat and wraps and put them away in the closet.  Her head was still carried high and her eyes were defiant and dark in the marble-like pallor of her face.  Except for her burning eyes and the scarlet line of her tightly closed lips, she looked as still and as cold as a statue.

“I’d rather die than have them know that it made any difference,” she thought.  “I’d rather die than have them know that I cared.”  Then sinking into a chair by the dressing-table, she laid her head on her arm and wept tears, not of wounded love, but of deep and passionate anger.

She had spoiled her life!  Because of her mad and headstrong folly, she had spoiled her life, and she was barely twenty-seven!  Had she been the veriest fool she couldn’t have done worse—­she who had thought herself so sensible, so strong, so efficient!  Jane couldn’t have done worse, and yet she had always despised Jane for her weakness.  But she had been as weak as Jane, she had been as unreasonable, she had been as incredibly sentimental and silly.  And even in her folly she had irretrievably failed.  She had made her choice, and yet she had not been able to keep the thing she had chosen.  George had tired of her—­here was the sharpest sting—­a man had tired of her after a few months—­had tired of her while she was still deeply in love with him.  Her humiliation, while she sat there strangling her sobs, was so intense that it ran in little flames over her body.  At the moment she was not angry with George, she was not even angry with Florrie.  It was as if all the slumbering violence of her nature was aroused to a burning and relentless hatred of her own weakness.  This emotion, which was so profound, so torrential, in its force that it seemed to shake the depths of her being, left room for no other feeling—­for no other thought in her consciousness.  She had but one life to live, and by her own fault, she had ruined it in its beginning.

Then her mood changed, and she sat up, straight and stern, while she wiped her reddened eyelids with an impetuous and resolute gesture.  No, she was not crushed; she would not allow herself even to be hurt.  Her lot might be as sordid as Jane’s, but she would make it different by the strength and the effectiveness of her resistance.  She would never submit as Jane submitted; she would never become, through sheer inertia, a part of the ugliness that enveloped her.  Thanks to the vein of iron in her soul she would never—­no, not if she died fighting—­become one of the victims of life.