The
woman, kissing the hand that strikes her, to shield it from the
falling of the law, is a type that has made no history; but in the
hearts of men she is to be found with her ineffaceable record.
It was against the two women, against Mrs. Durlacher with her
damnable cunning, against the other with her still more damnable
fascination, that all the blinding acid of Sally's thoughts was cast.
The woman who had hoodwinked him with her lies about her husband,
the woman who had crept in, seizing the moment of his blindness--these
were the two people in the world whom she could willingly have
strangled with her little hands that gripped and loosened in the mad
emotion of her rage. Under her breath she muttered--hissing the
words--the vain things that she would do. All the civilized refinement
of humanity was burnt out of her. She was not human. She had lost
control. The thoughts that revelled in her brain were animal; the
savage fury of the beast starved of its food and then deprived of the
flesh and blood that are snatched from the very clutching of its claws.
It is not so far a call, even now, for this divine humanity, weaned
upon the nutritious food of intelligence, nursed in the refining lap
of civilization, to hark back, driven by one rush of events, to the
lowest forms of nature that exist.
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