Something tightened in her soul, and the emotion she had experienced the moment before flowed away from her. Receding, it left a hardened accretion like petrifying lava flowing down cold from a volcanic crater. Still she stared at herself. Homely woman. It seemed to her that her veins crept like snakes along her arms. Life stealing upon one through the veins. Stealthy life running red and silent in its bitterness through the body. Where to go to? Horace Ridge. He has any woman he wants. Famous man. Me. She felt slightly intoxicated by a frank acknowledgment of her absurdity. Her horror of herself crept over her body, shameful because of no use. I can't endure it! Her wrist pressed against her teeth and made a mark, but no blood came. She wanted to tear away her flesh, but it seemed to resist her. It was full of hurt where her teeth had pressed. Life sucked at her like a wild beast. She turned from the mirror and hurled herself face downward sobbing on the bed. Her body oppressed her. She cried a long time. The work would have to go. At last she crept off the bed and undressed herself and put out the light, but she lay awake, and the darkness remained electric and horrible. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out its intimacy. Mamma and Papa Farley. What was wrong between them? Sex. Horror. She tried to keep her thoughts from integrating. Child. She bit her wrist again and turned over in bed. Too proud to hate Winnie. Other girls. Their faces opened against hers. They were white and flowering in the dark. Eyes open, waiting to receive men. She shivered. One must think about these things. Winnie's maternity. Bobby seemed slimed all over with Winnie. To wash Bobby clean--clean of Winnie! Alice was still awhile. She was dark inside, but the dark grew calm. She began to go over things very clearly. What was passion? Fourteen years old. Pain. Words written on back fences. I am glad to be out of it. Poor little Winnie. Outside, cool. Cool ache of being outside life. Horace Ridge's settled form, quiet against the dancing window. He turned in his chair. Kind eyes behind glasses. He could keep people outside him because he had all they could give him already there behind brown agate eyes. Albert Price--short trousers, face like a girl's. They knew. She, twenty-nine years old, outside their lives. She did not want her body. If she could only make Horace Ridge understand that she had no body! Clothes made her virgin when she was a mother. If she could undress herself he would know that she was a mother. Clothes made him forty-three years old, radical critic of life and manners, ruined health, blindness incipient. She wanted to undress him to show him how little he was.