She attempted to follow the line of her argument, a moment before so clear, but the word "renunciation" died away in a sigh. She helplessly returned his look. And the gigantic statues increased her bewilderment; for the one thought that seemed to leap behind the statues' staring eyes, between their huge and rigid lips, in the hollow of their stony breasts, was the naturalness of loving wildly. Emil dropped his lips on her wrist. Releasing the hand, she sought to repulse him, but instead, she clutched his hair with a tenderness almost convulsive. "Oh, you are killing me!" she moaned. Drawing himself up, he tried to take her in his arms; but with sudden violence, she forced his head downward. "Oh, you torture me!" she panted. He grasped her hands;--and once more, before her drowning sight, wavered the statues. In a delirious flash she realized the similarity of their fate. Like them, she was destined to stand forth under an open sky, testifying to a command contrary to nature, but which had been laid upon her kind from time immemorial. She pushed Emil from her, and pressing her hands to her breast, fled head down from the place. Instantly he was upon his feet: "You are not going?" ...... Among the statues, quiet, watchful, the words trembled and died away; then in sympathy the statues seemed to shudder at that cry of agony and surprise. CHAPTER IX THE ENERGY OF BEING Cabs were an infrequent phenomenon in that quarter and a crowd of small boys,--eager, dirty, volatile, with thin bare little legs and miserable little elbows, were gathered around the knock-kneed horse that dejectedly hung its head. They were feeding the animal with dusty grass plucked from between the cobblestones of the pavement. But at Rachel's approach they fell away as if pushed away. The driver in his tall hat bent to receive her order. She gave it without looking at him. Mad, uncalculating love, too long repressed, struggled in her with a vague sense of shame. But at first the sense of shame was shadowy indeed. Carried out of every perception but the throbbing one of her loss of self in Emil, for a time she heard only his words "my own." "Yes, yours, yours always," the blood proclaimed, and the soul's contradiction sounded small and faint. Then, as the voice of conscience grew stronger, she turned her head from side to side in agony. Chaste and fiercely proud, she told herself she was a humiliated woman. But not his the blame. All that had happened she had invited. By her expression she seemed to be saying, "I will not think." None the less she did think. She went over the scene from which she had just issued, not once, but countless times, and at each repetition she extracted from it the keenest misery, the most poignant bliss. All the mystery and domination of her passion were written on her face and at intervals sighs escaped her, mingled with breathless, half-articulated words: