Mary was too ill to go to work that night, and on the night following she was no better. The shock, the spasm of success, the recoil, not moral but physical, after the satisfaction of a supreme desire--these things were, of themselves, enough to leave her prostrate. But, in addition to these, she had, while standing at that open door, contracted one of those heavy colds to which she was now rendered especially susceptible. Through long hours of the day and the darkness she tossed among the hot sheets of her bed, sometimes with her teeth clicking in a chill, again with her body burning in a fever, but always revolving in her seething brain the details of the vengeance that she had wrought. Her physical sufferings mattered little to her. There were hours when she was wholly incapable of feeling them. When the inertia of the state of reaction began at last to wear away, it left her with a glow of recollection so great that there seemed no place for lesser sensation. She had accomplished her great work, she had achieved her mission. What she had done had been done solely for her own heart's sake; there had been no delusion of a celestial command, no distorted thought of a social duty; yet, the impulse, however utilitarian, had been supreme, and its end filled her with a sense of triumph that, for want of the proper title, she was sure was happiness. A wiser head and an unwounded heart would have known enough of life to see that even Max Grossman was not entirely to blame. A better brain could have looked back into the past. It could have seen Max as the type of all his kind, the symbol of every one of the great company of slavers, the inevitable result of a system blind both to its own interests and to the interests of the race. It could have seen the child, one of half a dozen born to a woman that could not, properly, have cared for three. It could have seen that child neglected, dirty, forgotten, locked, by day, in the bedroom where the whole family tried vainly to sleep by night, learning the highest facts of life from the worst of teachers: the cramped childish brain--and going out, at last, upon the street, with passions prematurely developed and perverted. It could have seen the social order shape that child into society's enemy: the starved boy-pickpocket sent to the monstrously misnamed "reformatory"; the same child branded as a criminal, with none to shelter or to trust him, and with a knowledge, gained in the state's own institution, which fitted him to be only a crafty gorilla to harass the state. It could have seen the fatal line of least resistance as clearly in the resultant man as it is seen in the life of him that does no more than wreck a bank or steal a corporation, and, hideous as its course is in the one instance, it would have seen that the line was the same in all.