Anne O'Hagan

“ The body will not long survive the recurrent rages and shiverings of its fevers; she knew that her spirit could not survive the ravages of emotion which existence with Thurston implied. And there was in her—no more a matter of her choice than was the thick, blue-blackness of her hair, the vigor of her strong, graceful body, the shadowed darkness of her gray eyes; no more her choice than these—an insistence upon life. ”

“ There spoke to her clear, balancing mind the purpose which had controlled her from the day when, out in the sunny, scented room with the heliotrope tapping the windows, she had told Thurston Eberlie that she must live. That purpose scorned, as sentimental, missish, her first revulsion from a new life of normal womanhood, it bade her be glad that nothing in her had been killed; bade her be honest to admit that, for her, there had been infinite possibilities of healing in life. ”

“ It would be the last time, she promised herself rigorously; to-day, perhaps, she had been forced to unlock the door of that old room in her heart in order to do her duty to Charlotte. But that duty was done now, and she could lock the door again and throw away the key. She could live henceforth in the ample, serenely ordered rooms of her love for Camden, of his love for her. Dear Camden! Her breast swelled with the surge of her gratitude to him, of her renewed purpose to be to him all that a devoted woman could be to a man. ”

“ But now you are old enough to hear me out; you have a trained mind; you must listen and judge for yourself, make your own decisions. I don't expect temptation to come to you in such varied or—or such vulgar forms as it came to Thurston." Charlotte shrank a little. She had never before heard her mother call her father's name. "You are a woman, which is in itself a safeguard, at any rate from the grosser, more promiscuous dangers. And I think—I hope with all my heart—your upbringing has not made for selfishness and self-indulgence. But you are Thurston Eberlie's own daughter. ”

“ Surely you aren't going to counsel me to—er—the sort of life in which my father, presumably, gave and found happiness?"
"No." Leila had always met even the crudest of Charlotte's flippancies without other reprimand than coldly and completely to ignore them. "I am merely trying to say this to you—you must be sure of yourself, very sure. Don't—how shall I put it inoffensively?—make any man the victim of your experimentation with love. I suffered bitterly in my youth at your father's hands. ”

“ But he would overcome it, he would—
"Thurston!" she had cried. "We can't go over this again. You were flirting before we were five months married, you were untrue to me before the year was past. And all those weeks before Charlotte was born— Oh, you wanted to be kind and thoughtful, and you quite adored me for bringing you a child—but all the time—all the time— Oh, can you not see it yourself? You can't resist the impulse to follow the woman who lures you, who intrigues you. ”

“ You have his eyes, his mouth, his laugh. His avidity for pleasure is in you, his zest for change, and some of his hardness—and some of his charm. Now you understand why I want you to be very sure of yourself before you marry Mr. O'Halloran—"
She stopped abruptly. She was looking over her daughter's thick, wavy, chestnut hair, out through the thin net curtains of her windows toward the lake, heaving slow, lead-colored waves, save where there flashed a pool of living steel from the reflection of the afternoon sun pushing strongly through a mass of gray clouds. ”

“ By and by, with great labor, she folded back the paper and read the column printed below the sinister collocation of black letters.
"Thurston Eberlie dead; forty-six years old." ("Yes, he was four years older than she.") "Headquarters in London for the past ten years—" ("Ah, so that was where he had been!") "Died, suddenly, in Algeria, pushing a French railroad." ("Algeria—he would have liked that—the heat, the color, the savagery that absolved a civilized man from his dull code of responsibility.") ”

“ Those five terrible, aching, lonely years, when sometimes she would have crawled to him on hands and knees, to place her neck beneath his foot, to implore him to take her back on what terms he would! Those five dogged years when she had said to herself: "I will live, I will! I will live, a whole woman ”