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 lust and nature's cunning. She would see her path and choose it. She would be mistress of her own body. She would order her future life as seemed best to herself.

It was the imprint of these thoughts that Jerry saw on her face as she sat sewing under the lamp; and the covert looks that he cast at her were ugly and ill omened.

For her there was stimulation mental and physical in such thoughts, and she began to grow stronger. It was this determination stubbornly adhered to and constantly borne in mind that made her arms powerful to rub the coarse clothes up and down on the washboard, that set the dasher thudding against the bottom of the churn more noisily than need be and drew the broom with brisk, emphatic strokes across the floor. When she gathered up the dishes she slapped the plates together with the emphasis of one who is indifferent as to whether they crack or not, and when she cleaned house the dust and feathers flew mightily. At the woodpile she was merciless to the saplings and rotted fence rails that Jerry had dragged up.

Often at the end of a day of such emphatic housekeeping, the old insidious weakness would slip into her bones, her knees would tremble and sink and she would drop with sudden exhaustion into the old rocking chair.

As she lay with her head against the bit of patchwork that was tied to the back of the chair, her eyes, the only parts of her that were not tired, would wander restlessly about the walls and ceiling. The winter before, in a vain attempt to keep out the cold, she had bought for a quarter a bundle of old newspapers and pasted them over two walls and part of the ceiling. She had intended to buy another bundle and finish the job, but had never gone beyond the intention. The papers had pulled apart over the cracks between the boards, they were yellowed with smoke and blotched with rain; but they still displayed their wealth of pictures. There were pictures of society people grinning and squatting on the sand at Palm Beach, pictures of smug, well fed dignitaries of church and state, pictures of business magnates, still smugger, fatter, and more rigorously curried, pictures of kings and generals pompously pin-