Page:O Genteel Lady! (1926).pdf/154

 Lanice started up as though it had been in the room with her. Her heart was beating fast and brokenly. She was conscious of having been awakened to keep some tryst. Usually a lamp burned lowly in the hall outside her door; now that she missed its faint crack of light upon her doorsill she was disturbed and lonely. No one in the house but grim Mrs. Andrews in the basement. With the fear of dark there also came a cruel spurt of emotion that welled up in her like a fountain.

She sat down shaking on the edge of her bed and said distinctly, but with a catch in her voice, 'Well, cry if you want to.' Then she began. Terrible tears that scalded her face, sobs that twisted her body, and drove her nails into the flesh of her palms. She called herself without mercy all the ugly names that she had ever read in Shakespeare, in tracts about dissolute women, and in the Bible. Then there was a lull and she lay exhausted, and thought over what she had been saying to herself and judiciously repudiated the most unpleasant of the epithets.

Then again an agonizing torrent of grief. The darkness, the disordered bedclothes, her long hair unbraided and now sweat-dampened and tangled about her, upwelling flood of bitterness within. She listened and heard herself moan. Anthony Jones was relatively unimportant. She did not blame him or call him names. This was a thing between herself and life. Life she blamed, and Nature, for making her what she was. Most bitterly of all she blamed herself. It was an inborn craving for something—something