She would not die in a day, she told herself again, desperately. She would not surrender everything without a struggle. What remained of her scattered legions of honor, she passionately promised herself, would still be gathered together and fostered and guarded. Above all things, she felt, she needed companionship. Durkin meant much to her—meant far too much to her, for time and time again he had only too easily shattered her card-house of good resolutions. She had blindly submerged herself for him and his efforts. It was not that she stopped to blame or reprove him; her feeling was more one of pity, of sorrow for the unstable and unreconciled nature in the fell clutch of circumstance. Yes, he meant more to her than she dare tell herself. But there were moods and moments when he proved inadequate, and to allow that sad truth to go unrecognized was more than blindness. If only she had, or could have, the friendship of a woman,—that was her oft-recurring thought,—the companionship of one warm nature quick to understand the gropings and aspirations of another. With such a friend, she vaguely felt, things might not yet be so ill with her. But she knew of none. There was no one, she realized, to whom she could look for help. And she tried to console herself with the bitter unction of the claim that with her the world had always been doggedly unkind and cruel, that with an Æschylean pertinacity, morbidly interpreted as peculiar to her case, fate, or destiny, or the vague forces for which those words stood, had hounded and frustrated her at every turn. This maddening feeling of self-hate and contempt stayed with her all that day. It made stiflingly hideous and sinister, to her brooding eyes, the over-furnished woman’s pool-room which had once been Penfield’s own, where she counted out her money and placed her bet on the Duke of Kendall. The broken-spirited and hard-faced women who waited about the operator’s wicket, the barrenness and malignity of their lives, the vainly muffled squalidness of that office of envenomed Chance, the abortive lust for gold without labor, the empty and hungry eyes that waited and watched the figure-covered blackboard, the wolf-like ears that pricked up at the report of some belated prey in the distance—it all filled Frances with a new and disheartening hatred of herself and the life into which she had drifted. “Oh, God!” she prayed silently, yet passionately, while the little sounder in the operator’s stall clicked and sang; “Oh, God, may it turn out that this shall be the last!”