“No, no,” she cried.  “I don’t want them, Claude.  I don’t want them.  Please!” She scarcely knew what she was saying.  And as she drew away from him her hands went out, were pressed together with an imploring, supplicating gesture.  He seized them.  His nearness was suffocating her, she flung herself into his arms, and their lips met in a long, swooning kiss.  She began instinctively but vainly to struggle, not against him —­but against a primal thing stronger than herself, stronger than he, stronger than codes and conventions and institutions, which yet she craved fiercely as her being’s fulfilment.  It was sweeping them dizzily —­whither?  The sheer sweetness and terror of it!

“Don’t, don’t!” she murmured desperately.  “You mustn’t!”

“Janet—­we’re going to be married, sweetheart,—­just as soon as we can.  Won’t you trust me?  For God’s sake, don’t be cruel.  You’re my wife, now—­”

His voice seemed to come from a great distance.  And from a great distance, too, her own in reply, drowned as by falling waters.

“Do you love me?—­will you love me always—­always?”

And he answered hoarsely, “Yes—­always—­I swear it, Janet.”  He had found her lips again, he was pulling her toward a door on the far side of the room, and suddenly, as he opened it, her resistance ceased....

The snow made automobiling impossible, and at half past nine that evening Ditmar had escorted Janet to the station in a cab, and she had taken the train for Hampton.  For a while she sat as in a trance.  She knew that something had happened, something portentous, cataclysmic, which had irrevocably changed her from the Janet Bumpus who had left Hampton that same morning—­an age ago.  But she was unable to realize the metamorphosis.  In the course of a single day she had lived a lifetime, exhausted the range of human experience, until now she was powerless to feel any more.  The car was filled with all sorts and conditions of people returning to homes scattered through the suburbs and smaller cities north of Boston—­a mixed, Sunday-night crowd; and presently she began, in a detached way, to observe them.  Their aspects, their speech and manners had the queer effect of penetrating her consciousness without arousing the emotional judgments of approval or disapproval which normally should have followed.  Ordinarily she might have felt a certain sympathy for the fragile young man on the seat beside her who sat moodily staring through his glasses at the floor:  and the group across the aisle would surely have moved her to disgust.  Two couples were seated vis-a-vis, the men apparently making fun of a “pony” coat one of the girls was wearing.  In spite of her shrieks, which drew general attention, they pulled it from her back—­an operation regarded by the conductor himself with tolerant amusement.  Whereupon her companion, a big, blond Teuton with an inane guffaw, boldly thrust an arm about her waist and held her while he presented the tickets.  Janet beheld all this as one sees dancers through a glass, without hearing the music.