Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/211

 —was a long, black-haired, black-eyed, black-clad woman with a dead white skin, staring forever before her. Couldn't the idiot recognize a tragedy when he saw it?

Then, with horror, she realized that her two natures were in conflict again; the tricky and malicious artist was at work within her even now, when she was in the midst of the deepest suffering she had ever known. In spite of her true anguish, she was thinking of herself as picturesque; and she was indignant with a cub of a boy, whom she had never seen before, because he did not perceive how picturesque she really was! And thus she reached the bottom of her despair. "No wonder I do such harm!" she thought. "My very soul is artificial—and hideous!"

But at night she lay in her berth in the train that still sped roaring northward—endlessly northward—and the desperation of her will to return was so great that, conscious of her own absurdity, she entreated the iron tracks beneath her to change their course, curve backward and bring her again, in the morning, to Raona.

"I've got to go back," she whispered to the soggy little pillow. "Ah, I want to see him again! I'll only