He put the glass in her hand, laced her cold fingers round it, and hurried across to a cupboard in one of the oak cabinets.  She was sipping the water bravely when he returned.  He took the glass from her, emptied nearly all the contents away into the coal-scuttle—­the first receptacle that came to his hand—­and poured in the neat spirit.

“Now drink a few sips of this,” he said.

She put it to her lips, then lowered her hand again.

“You’re really very kind to me,” she said in gratitude.

“Kind!  Not a bit.  Go on—­drink it.”

She drank a little, obediently, and the points of light came back again into her eyes, the colour burnt once more with a little fevered glow in her cheeks.  Then she sat up suddenly with the glass gripped tightly in her hand.

“Oh, what a fool you must think I am,” she exclaimed bitterly, “to make a scene like this, the very first evening that you bring me to your rooms.  I am so sorry, so awfully sorry.”

He looked at her in wonder.  “Great heavens!” he said.  “There’s nothing to be sorry about.  If any one should be sorry, it ought to be myself.  I let you in for it.  I suppose it is a filthy sight, when you’re not accustomed to it.”

“Yes, but you must think me so weak.  And I’m not weak really; I’m very strong.”

He saw part of the pathos of this, but not all of it.  He did not realize that she was pleading for herself with all the earnestness of her soul.  He had no subtlety of mind, and the fact was too subtle for him to grasp that the whole scene which had taken place with that other woman in his rooms upstairs was being re-enacted, but with a different motive.  That woman had fought for his money, his protection for her future.  Sally was warring against the frailty of her body for his love.  Of his selfishness, she had seen nothing.  His cruelty, that she had seen; the beast in the every-man, that she had realized as well.

But in the components of a woman there may always be found that unswerving subjection to the lower nature of the man.  It is a passive submission—­for which we have much to be thankful—­taking upon itself in its most extreme form, no more definite expression than the parted lips, eyes glazed with passion, and the body inert in its total abandonment.

It is foolish, therefore, to say that man, in that lower animalism of his nature, is alone in the supposed God-creation of his likeness to the divinity.  The very instinct itself would die out were there not in woman the passive echo to answer to its call.  Divine he may be; in every man there is the possibility, the nucleus, of divinity; but it has not yet shaken off the beast of the fields which blindly, obstinately, without intelligence, hinders the onward path of its progress.

It was this part of her nature, then, in Sally that answered to the display of the lower instincts in Traill.  By reason of that part of her, she understood it; by reason of it also, and because she loved him, she was neither thwarted nor dismayed in her desire to win him to herself.