She felt as if she must be alone. All the day since that crisis the presence of people had intruded clamorously upon her consciousness. She would fain take counsel within herself, her own soul. Above all, she wished to avoid the sight of her husband, the thought of him. Whenever the sound of voices in the dining-room broke on her absorption as she neared the door in her pacing back and forth, she paused, looking over her shoulder, tense, poised, as if for flight. And at last, as the clamor of quitting the table heralded the approach of the company, with scarcely a realized intention, the instinct of escape took possession of her, and she sped lightly up the great staircase, as elusive, as unperceived as the essence of the echoes which she had fancied might thence descend. She hesitated, gasping and out of breath, at the head of the flight, looking about aghast at the gaunt aspect of the wrecked mansion. The hall was a replica of the one below, save that there were three great windows opening on a balcony instead of the front door. The glass was broken out, the Venetian blinds were torn away, and from where she stood she could see the massive Corinthian columns of the portico rising to the floor of the story still above. A number of large apartments opened on this hall, their proportions and ornate mantel-pieces all visible, for the doors, either swung ajar or wrenched from their hinges, lay upon the floors. Paula did not note, or perhaps she forgot, that the wreck expressed forty years of neglect, of license and rapine and was the wicked work of generations of marauders. She felt that the destruction was actuated by a sort of fiendish malice. It had required both time and strength, as well as wanton enmity, a class hatred, one might suppose, bitter and unreasoning, the wrath of the poor against the rich, even though unmindful and indifferent to the injury. It seemed so strange to her that the house should be left thus by its owners, despite its inutilities in the changed conditions of the world. It had a dignity, as of the ruin of princes, in its vestiges of beauty and splendor, and the savor of old days that were now historic and should hold a sort of sanctity. Even the insensate walls, in the rifts of their shattered plaster, their besmirched spoliation, expressed a subtle reproach, such as one might behold in some old human face buffeted and reviled without a cause.