A further point was this. Some of the practices to which Mrs. Harding was addicted were obviously distasteful to Marian; it was a temptation to her, therefore, to reduce Marian to her own level, and to this temptation she now yielded. The episode with Geraldstein pleased her, as a step in the direction to which she desired to drive Marian. One of the practices which was at present abhorrent to Marian was over-indulgence in drink. Once she had been spending the evening at a rather noisy restaurant with Mrs. Harding; they had met there two young fellows, of that age when women and wine are temptations all the more deadly because the yielding to them is held in reprobation by those from whose authority they have but recently been released. Marian was utterly bored by the pointless and often indecent jests, and watched with disgust the quantity of wine which her friend drank and its influence upon her. Mrs. Harding saw that she was being watched. “Don’t mind her,” she said to the youth who sat beside Marian, pestering her with his plain-spoken attentions. “She’s young and is afraid of being jolly. Some night she’ll get a bottle of fizzy inside her, and’ll be all over the place before she knows where she is. Once bitten, never shy again. Drink up, Marian, it won’t hurt you. Let’s have another bottle, boys.” Marian left the party, her departure not meeting with any real protest, and the next morning received a visit from Mrs. Harding, whose skin was unwholesome to look at and her eyes blowzed and bloodshot. “I suppose you’ll tell me it serves me right,” she said, “but my head’s aching fit to split. I wouldn’t have come down, but I’ve run out of brandy; don’t preach, dear, but just be good and give me a B. and S.” For a week or so after the dinner with West, Marian’s life was very quiet outwardly. Inwardly she lived tossed this way and that by a turmoil of contrary desires. She realized with terror that she was losing grip upon herself; that her physical emotions were daily growing more and more imperious. When she had sundered herself from her old and had plunged into this new life, she had fully counted on using her bodily gifts to procure her the ends for which her soul thirsted. But this life was different to what she had expected it to be, and now her mental desires were rapidly growing weaker, and the lust of mere pleasure and excitement was usurping their place. Her visit to Maddison at Rottingdean and her friendship with West had stayed for a while this degeneration, and now she had come to look upon the latter as the one bulwark remaining between her and a life of promiscuous debauchery.