As if in the development of her feeling Linda had a sensation of crashing with a sickening violence from a pedestal to the ground. Actually, it seemed, the catastrophe had happened to her. She heard, with a sense of inutility, Arnaud denouncing the outrage; he had a pencil in his hand for the composition of a telegram to Dodge. He paid--but perhaps only naturally--no attention to her, suffering dully from her fall. She shuddered before the recreated lawless approaching voice of the mob; the naked ugly violence froze her with terror; she felt the gross hurried hands winding ropes about her, the rending brutality of force-- She sat and automatically took a small carved glass of orange-juice from a bed of ice, and her chilled fingers recalled a dim image of her mother. Arnaud was speaking, “I'm afraid this will cut through Pleydon's security, it was such a wanton destruction of his unique power. You see, he worked lovingly over the cast with little files and countless finite improvements. The mold, I think, was broken. What a piece of luck the thing's at Cottarsport.” He paused, obviously expecting her to comment; but suddenly phrases failed her. In place of herself she should be considering Dodge; her sympathy even for him was submerged in her own extraordinary injury. However, she recovered from her first gasping shock, and made an utterly commonplace remark. Never had her sense of isolation been stronger. “I must admit,” her husband continued, “that I looked for some small display of concern. I give you my word there are moments when I think Pleydon himself cut you out of stone. He isn't great enough for that, though; in the way of perfection you successfully gild the lily. A thing held to be impossible.” Linda told him with amazing inanity that his opinion of her was unreliable; and, contented, he lightly pursued his admiration of what he called her boreal charm. At intervals she responded appropriately and proceeded with breakfast. She had entered a region of dispassionate consideration, her characteristic detachment, she thought, regained. She mentally, calmly, reconstructed the motives and events that had led to the destruction of the statue; they, at least, were evident to her. She reaffirmed silently her conviction that it had resulted from the stupidity, the vanity, of a woman. The limitations of men, fully as narrow, operated in other directions. Then, with an incredulous surprise, she was aware that the clear space of her reason was filling with anger. Never before had such a flood of emotion possessed her; and she surrendered herself, in an enormous relief, to the novelty of its obliterating tide. It deepened immeasurably, sweeping her far from the security of old positions of indifference and critical self-possession. Linda became enraged at a world that had concentrated all its degraded vulgarity in one unspeakable act. XXXVII