“I was sorry I sent for you the moment afterward,” she said, hardly yielding to Laura’s embrace, while she nervously tore open a bill she held and then tossed it aside without glancing over it.  “It’s the same thing over again—­there’s no use talking about it.  I shall die.”

“You cannot—­you cannot,” protested Laura, still holding her in her arms.  “You are too beautiful.  You were never in your life lovelier than you are to-day.”

“And yet it does not hold him,” broke out Gerty, in sudden passion, “and it will never be any better, I see that.  If it’s not one it’s another, but it’s always somebody.  A year ago he promised me that I should never have cause for jealousy again—­he swore that and I believed him—­and now this—­this—­”

Her anger choked her like a sob, and she tore with trembling fingers at the papers in her lap.  Then suddenly her brow contracted with resolution, and she went through a long list of items as if the most important fact in life were the amount of money she must pay to her dressmaker.

“Of course you know what I think,” murmured Laura with her lips at Gerty’s ear.

“That he isn’t worth it,” Gerty nodded, while her indignant and humiliated expression grew almost violent.  “Well, I think so, too.  Of course he isn’t, but that doesn’t make it any better—­any easier.”

“You mean you couldn’t give him up?”

“When I’m dead I may, not before.”  She closed her eyes and a long shudder ran through her body.  “It has been nothing but a fight since I married—­a fight to keep him.  I used to think that marriage meant rest, contentment, but I know now that it means a battle—­all the time—­every instant.  I’ve never had one natural moment, I’ve never since the beginning been without a horrible suspicion—­and I see now that I never shall be.  He likes me best I know—­in his heart he really puts me first—­but there are others and I won’t have it.  I’ll be alone, I’ll be the only one or nothing.  I said I wouldn’t be beaten the first time, and I won’t—­I won’t be beaten.”  She paused an instant to draw breath.  “And I haven’t been,” she wound up in bitter triumph.

“You’ll never be, darling,” declared Laura; “who is there on earth to shine against you?”

The violence faded from Gerty’s face, yielding to an expression of disgust, of spiritual loathing—­the loathing of a creature that hates the thing it loves.

“But it isn’t worth it, it isn’t worth it,” she moaned, pushing the papers away from her with an indignant gesture, and rising from her chair to walk hurriedly up and down the floor.  “It isn’t worth it, but I’m bound to it—­I can’t get away.  I’m bound to the wheel.  Do you think if I could help myself—­if I could be different—­that I would turn into a mere bond-slave to my body?  Why, a day labourer has rest, but I haven’t.  There’s not a moment when I’m not doing something for my beauty, or planning effects, or undergoing