That which had happened--there memory, in a blinding blast, reasserted itself. What had been but half-wittingly accepted was now wholly known. Hot irons were branding upon her brain the full history of all that had occurred: the deeds for which she had at last learned the name, and the deeds that, even in her own frightened soul, were nameless. There was nothing--nothing of her, hand and foot, and mouth and eye and soul--that was not defiled. For herself, for Max, but most of all for the hideous facts of life, she shook in physical disgust. Before the face of such things, what must birth and marriage mean? She opened her eyes, but she could not look at her silent witnesses; she shut her lids, but she saw, behind them, the hairy arms of a gorilla closing on her, to break her and bear her away. For one moment, all that she had loved she hated, and for the next, seizing his smiling reassurance as the one vow that could legalize what nothing could refine, all that she had come to hate she tried to force herself to love. She understood now so much that she had never understood before: the whispered words of town gossip, the stray glimpses of lovers in the summer lanes, the cautions and the commands that had once so galled her in her home. At the word, her mind swung back to far-away yesterday. She was sorry that she had been the cause--for she had been the cause--of the spilling of the stew. She was sorry that she had been so sharp with Sallie. She wished that she had washed the dishes less unwillingly. She still feared--she more than ever feared--the swaying bulk of masculinity that had been her father, but she began to see in him the logical result of forces that were themselves, as yet, beyond her ken; and she looked with a new and pitying vision upon the picture of her little, work-worn and care-marked mother stooping over the polished kitchen-stove. Her breast tossed and her throat throbbed; but she was beyond tears. Painfully, slowly, yet with resolution, she struggled back to her sitting-posture in the bed. In this position she found herself facing a long mirror hung against the opposite wall, and in the mirror she saw what was herself. With a low cry, she pulled loose the sheet and covered her nakedness. That done, she looked again at the strange face that fronted her: a face the more strange because it was the intimate become alien, a ruin, an accusation. Framed in a tangle of dank hair, the cheeks, once pink, were chalky now, and splotched with red, the mouth that she had known only as full and firm, was loose and twisted; the eyes that had been blue, now circled with black, burned in blood-shot fields like coals of angry fire.