ks of red sandstone floated sluggishly down
the Nile for the pyramid of Khufu the King; she was the flushed
voluptuousness relaxed in the scented spray of pagan baths; the woman with
piled and white-powdered hair in a gold shift of Louis XIV; the prostitute
with a pinched waist and great flowered sleeves of the Maison Doree. She
was as old as the first vice, as the first lust budding like a black
blossom in the morbidity of men successful, satiated.

She was old, but Lettice was older.

Lettice was more ancient than men walking cunning and erect, than the
lithe life of sun-heated tangles, than the vital principle of flowering
plants fertilized by the unerring chance of vagrant insects and airs.

Standing in the flooding blue flame of day they opposed to each other the
forces fatally locked in the body of humanity. Lettice, with her unborn
child, her youth haggard with apprehension and pain, the prefigurement of
the agony of birth, gazed, dumb and bitter in her sacrifice, at the
graceful, cold figure that, as irrevocably as herself, denied all that
Lettice affirmed, desired all that she feared and hated.

"Why, that's bad, Gordon," she reiterated, "I'm your wife. And Miss Beggs
is bad, I'm certain of that." A spasm of suffering crossed her face like a
cloud.

"You ought not to have come, Lettice. Lettice, you ought not to have
come," he told her. His dull voice reflected the lassitude that had fallen
upon him, the sudden death of all emotion, the swift extinguishing of his
interest in the world about him; it reflected, in his indifference to
desire, an indifference to Meta Beggs.

"Do you love her, Gordon?" his wife asked.

"No, I don't," he answered, perceptibly impatient at the question.

"Do you like her better than you like me?"

The palpable answer to her query, that he thought of himself more than
either, evaded him. "I don't like her better than I like you," he repeated
baldly.

Lettice turned to the other woman. "There's not much you can say," she
declared, "caught like this trying to steal somebody's husband. And you
set over a school of children!"

"I don't choose to be," Meta Beggs retorted. "I hate it, but I had to
live. If you hadn't had all that money to keep you soft, yes, and get you
a husband, you would have had to fight and do, too. You might have been
teaching a roomful of little sneaks, and sick to death of it before ever
you began ... or you might be on the street--better girls have than