Katy John proved the final straw. Just by what means Stella grew to suspect any such moral lapse on Benton's part is wholly irrelevant. Once the unpleasant likelihood came to her notice, she took measures to verify her suspicion, and when convinced she taxed her brother with it, to his utter confusion. "What kind of a man are you?" she cried at last in shamed anger. "Is there nothing too low for you to dabble in? Haven't you any respect for anything or anybody, yourself included?" "Oh, don't talk like a damned Puritan," Benton growled, though his tanned face was burning. "This is what comes of having women around the camp. I'll send the girl away." "You--you beast!" she flared--and ran out of the kitchen to seek refuge in her own room and cry into her pillow some of the dumb protest that surged up within her. For her knowledge of passion and the workings of passion as they bore upon the relations of a man and a woman were at once vague and tinctured with inflexible tenets of morality, the steel-hard conception of virtue which is the bulwark of middle-class theory for its wives and daughters and sisters--with an eye consistently blind to the concealed lapses of its men. Stella Benton passed that morning through successive stages of shocked amazement, of pity, and disgust. As between her brother and the Siwash girl, she saw little to choose. From her virtuous pinnacle she abhorred both. If she had to continue intimate living with them, she felt that she would be utterly defiled, degraded to their level. That was her first definite conclusion. After a time she heard Benton come into their living room and light a fire in the heater. She dried her eyes and went out to face him. "Charlie," she declared desperately, "I can't stay here any longer. It's simply impossible." "Don't start that song again. We've had it often enough," he answered stubbornly. "You're not going--not till spring. I'm not going to let you go in the frame of mind you're in right now, anyhow. You'll get over that. Hang it, I'm not the first man whose foot slipped. It isn't your funeral, anyway. Forget it." The grumbling coarseness of this retort left her speechless. Benton got the fire going and went out. She saw him cross to the kitchen, and later she saw Katy John leave the camp with all her belongings in a bundle over her shoulder, trudging away to the camp of her people around the point. Kipling's pregnant line shot across her mind: "For the colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins." "I wonder," she mused. "I wonder if we are? I wonder if that poor, little, brown-skinned fool isn't after all as much a victim as I am. She doesn't know better, maybe; but Charlie does, and he doesn't seem to care. It merely embarrasses him to be found out, that's all. It isn't right. It isn't fair, or decent, or anything. We're just for him to--to use."