Afraid to stop longer, lest in her agitation she should wake the children, she took up the lamp again and went on to her own room. Too weary to sleep, she tossed restlessly on her bed, pressing her cool fingers to her hot forehead and burning eyes. The interview with Carolina, the subsequent scene with her husband, repeated themselves over and over in her tired brain; the demoniac mask of Egidio's which had scared her vision, seemed branded on her very soul like some horrid Medusa-head. And the effect of that exhibition of impotent rage had been that of the Medusa; she had felt herself turning to stone, had almost felt the wells of common human feeling dry up in her heart. Certainly she was no longer conscious of the slightest bond of human interest between herself and this man; nay, to her he had become the _Beast_, no longer a man at all. And she was subject to this Beast, his slave, his chattel, his wife! The name was a mockery. Virginia was a wife indeed, Virginia, happy with her husband and children, living her busy, blessed life in the house she loved. But this--no marriage but a hateful bondage. It was an immoral contradiction to all right living and thinking. Could any man-made law or social convention justify the iniquity of this horror? Ragna wondered dully why she had not been able, like Carolina, to accept the consequences of her weakness. She saw now in the clear light of unsparing self-study, how at the time of her marriage she had wilfully blinded herself to what had been patent to the eyes of Virginia, how she had weakly let the consideration of her social security outweigh the fundamental instincts of her nature. But it was not in the spirit of calm acceptance that she thus put to the test motives and conduct; she was in no condition for dispassionate investigation or conclusion; her nature, raw and abraded by the events of the day and still more by the cumulative effect of all the preceding days, seethed in a state of bitter revolt. She longed with a fierce, mad desire to straighten her back, to throw off the burden that galled her, to break once and for all the chains that degraded her in her own eyes. No one who saw her as she was now, fierce-eyed, feverish, her long hair unbound and streaming over the pillow would have known her for the calm stately woman whose formal courtesy of manner was a by-word among her friends. Rather she seemed a Valkyrie riding down the battling clouds, challenging the thunder. It was the old Ragna of the storm-swept fjord, but a Ragna who had eaten of the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, wild with a sense of injustice, resentful of fate. Gradually she grew calmer, the flame burnt itself out, and weary to the core of her being she relaxed her aching limbs and abandoned her head among the pillows. Dulled, numb, she was dozing off, when a voice seemed to say in her ear: "Angelescu is in Florence." A slight smile parted her dry lips and she fell asleep. CHAPTER VIII