Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/85

Rh found the incandescent coals of her hatred fanned by the thought of her helplessness. For it was for more than the mere indignities to her person that she hated the man. She hated him for crushing down with an over-brutal heel the egg-shell dream of her emancipation. She hated him for defiling her peace of mind, for undermining her faith in a care-free world which she had fought so hard to attain. He had done more than hurt her pride; he had shaken her temple of art down about her ears.

Teddie began to see, as she felt seismic undulations in what she had so foolishly accepted as bed-rock, that her home-life had perhaps stood for more than she imagined. It had meant not an accidental but an elaborately sustained dignity, a harboring seclusion, an achieved though cluttered-up spaciousness where the wheels of existence revolved on bearings so polished that one was apt to forget their power. And all this took her thoughts on to Ruby Reamer, the businesslike young girl of the studios from whom, without quite realizing it, she had learned so much.