She recoiled, pressing her hands against the wall for support. A man had never before struck her. She might have been crucified to the wall, her hands out on either side, holding her body upright; she seemed to hang by her hands. I am sure that she heard what went on around her, and that she could take no part because she had been deprived of her reason for ever again speaking. He had smitten something which had held her up; and this eventually she tried to tell him. But smiling women pressed in on her, clawing at her with words--tearing out her eyes with saccharine words--hurting her, defiling her. She heard them say to each other that she wept because she was not the central light of the party. She told me afterwards that she did not know how she heard these words, for already she was running from the house; but under the strain of her suffering she must have turned clairaudient. The party, becoming too terrible for her spirit, transformed all gatherings of her friends into horrors no longer to be borne; she must not see them again. She said this many times, on her way home: she must never again see her friends. Gathering up her wrap and mine, I said to Addis Wickersham that I must try to overtake her. “She looks very strange. She’s apt to do anything.” “Nonsense,” he said comfortably. “She’s strange because she gets away with it.” I did not believe this to be a pose on Eva’s part. I insisted on going after her. I found myself saying, many times, “She can’t help it.” She walked rapidly. I saw her ahead of me, her thin frock blowing back in the night breeze. She had almost reached the little friendly house in Eleventh Street when I overtook her; she had walked more slowly as she approached her home wherein her husband awaited her return. With a final run, I caught her by the arm; and she seemed to come out of a trance. “Oh, it’s only you,” she said. She began telling me much of what I have just repeated, and the climax of her rush towards her home. She had said to herself that she must get off from the crowd and think. Her look turned in, and she began to know fear in its decadence. She realized that she must uproot this particular fear, if she was to go on. Time was what she needed--time in which she would hear no unkind word: security in that time. She stopped and leaned against the wall of a house. She tried to tell herself: “It’s their jealousy.” But, her senses more than ever acute, as if she had passed through the valley of the shadow of death, she looked back and read on their faces everything they had not said, and her own intelligence arose to defeat her. She heard herself groaning. Everyday life pressed in on her: a policeman stopped to look curiously at her. “Anything wrong, lady?” She straightened. “No. Nothing.” She added: “Thank you, officer.”