rode all the way home that way.

But the inevitable reaction came. Revulsion might be the more accurate
word applied to Cecille. That night she had stripped off one stocking
in preparation for bed; she had sat longer than she could have told,
broodingly studying her bare knee.

"No smoother than he," she murmured at last.

The sound of her own voice smote her, the thing that she had said.

As her head flung up she encountered in a mirror her own reflection.
She stared, transfixed, at her image; her moist, curling mouth, her
dusky cheeks and eyelids drooping down. Then she closed her eyelids
tight to shut it out. She groped and found the light and snapped it
off. And she lay hours upon her face, her hair fanwise on her pillow,
sick and debased.

She laid it to the pitch that she had touched. You _had_ to be
defiled. But she didn't blame Felicity. She wasn't that kind of a
coward. It must be the slow poison of her frank creed. She'd fight
it. Game? She'd be game. But this time she refused to wonder why she
didn't pack her bag and get out. She couldn't. She knew she couldn't
go. She wondered why she couldn't cry.

Thus she found a private little hell in what should have been pure
glory.

But she fought. After she had admitted to herself that she loved him,
she crouched from it like something in a corner. Love? That wasn't
love! And yet Felicity in all her passionless calculation had never
once--

It baffled her, bowed her down. It was too snarled now. She'd never
make it out. But she wouldn't go again to the gymnasium. No! But
what of that? She had only to close her eyes to see. She fought it.

It was a very hot though private little hell.

CHAPTER IX

DUNHAM TALKS BUSINESS

And presently Perry learned why he had been keeping in shape.
Something did turn up. It happened in this wise:

Felicity had been very canny; she'd made each trump card tell. And
with Perry Blair waved always in his face, Dunham had grown ugly.

"You know I'm crazy about you," he complained. "Give that four-flusher
the gate."

"A million Johns have told me that," Felicity answered. "Talk
business."

But Dunham had refused to talk business. He was ugly about it. And
then he thought to see a way around. He sent for Perry Blair, and
Perry came. That surprised Dunham. He had expected in the end to have
to go to Blair. He did not know how Felicity, unwittingly, had helped
him.

For Felicity