She could not do it! Her heart had failed her. Before that final test she had succumbed, ignominiously and absolutely. For in one moment of reverie, as she faced that hostelry of all modern life’s unloveliness, her own future existence lay before her eyes, as in a painted picture, from day to day and year to year. It had been branded on her consciousness as vividly as had that picture of a far different life, which had come to her behind the ivy-covered walls of her uncle’s parsonage. It was a continuous today of evil, an endless tomorrow of irresolution. Day by day she was becoming more firmly linked to that ignoble and improvident class who fed on the very offal of social activity. She was becoming more and more a mere drifting derelict upon the muddy waters of the lower life, mindless and soulless and purposeless. No; not altogether mindless, she corrected herself, for with her deeper spiritual degradation, she felt, she was becoming more and more an introspective and self-torturing dreamer, self-deceiving and self-blighting—like a veritable starving rat, that has been forced to turn and nibble ludicrously at its own tail. Yet why had she faltered and hesitated, at such a moment, she demanded of herself. This she could not fully answer. She was becoming enigmatic, even to herself. And already it was too late to draw back—even the tantalizing dream of withdrawal was now a mockery. For, once, she had thought that life was a single straight thread; now she knew it to be a mottled fabric in which the past is woven and bound up with the future, in which tangled tomorrows and yesterdays make up the huddled cloth. She writhed, in her agony of mind, at the thought that she had no one to whom to open her soul. This she had always shrunk from doing before Durkin (and that, she warned herself, was an ill omen) and there had been no one else to whom she could go for comradeship and consolation. Then she began making excuses for herself, feebly, at first, more passionately as she continued her preoccupied pacing of the floor. She was only one of many. Women, the most jealously guarded and the most softly shrouded women had erred. And, after all, much lay in the point of view. What was criminality from one aspect, was legitimate endeavor from another. All life, she felt, was growing more feverish, more competitive, more neuropathic, more potentially and dynamically criminal. She was a leaf on the current of the time.