No sooner was she in the train, however, than she forgot Mr. Tiernan utterly.  Up to the present the mental process of dwelling upon her own experience of the last three months had been unbearable, but now she was able to take a fearful satisfaction in the evolving of parallels between her case and Lise’s.  Despite the fact that the memories she had cherished were now become hideous things, she sought to drag them forth and compare them, ruthlessly, with what must have been the treasures of Lise.  Were her own any less tawdry?  Only she, Janet, had been the greater fool of the two, the greater dupe because she had allowed herself to dream, to believe that what she had done had been for love, for light! because she had not listened to the warning voice within her!  It had always been on the little, unpremeditated acts of Ditmar that she had loved to linger, and now, in the light of Lise’s testimony, of Lise’s experience, she saw them all as false.  It seemed incredible, now, that she had ever deceived herself into thinking that Ditmar meant to marry her, that he loved her enough to make her his wife.  Nor was it necessary to summon and marshal incidents to support this view, they came of themselves, crowding one another, a cumulative and appalling array of evidence, before which she stood bitterly amazed at her former stupidity.  And in the events of yesterday, which she pitilessly reviewed, she beheld a deliberate and prearranged plan for her betrayal.  Had he not telephoned to Boston for the rooms, rehearsed in his own mind every detail of what had subsequently happened?  Was there any essential difference between the methods of Ditmar and Duval?  Both were skilled in the same art, and Ditmar was the cleverer of the two.  It had only needed her meeting with Lise, in that house, to reveal how he had betrayed her faith and her love, sullied and besmirched them.  And then came the odd reflection,—­how strange that that same Sunday had been so fateful for herself and Lise!

The agony of these thoughts was mitigated by the scorching hatred that had replaced her love, the desire for retaliation, revenge.  Occasionally, however, that stream of consciousness was broken by the recollection of what she had permitted and even advised her sister to do; and though the idea of the place to which Lise was going sickened her, though she achieved a certain objective amazement at the transformation in herself enabling her to endorse such a course, she was glad of having endorsed it, she rejoiced that Lise’s child would not be born into a world that had seemed—­so falsely—­fair and sweet, and in reality was black and detestable.  Her acceptance of the act—­for Lise—­was a function of the hatred consuming her, a hatred which, growing in bigness, had made Ditmar merely the personification of that world.  From time to time her hands clenched, her brow furrowed, powerful waves of heat ran through her, the craving for action became so intense she could scarcely refrain from rising in her seat.