made her unfit. From the soft feminine tissue,
intricacies of mood and fancy were being obliterated. Rudimentary
instincts were developing, positive and barbaric as a child's. In the
old days she had been dainty about her food. Now she cooked it in
blackened pans and ate with the hunger of the men. Sleep, that once had
been an irksome and unwelcome break between the pleasures of well-ordered
days, was a craving that she satisfied, unwashed, often half-clad. In
Rochester she had spent thought and time upon her looks, had stood before
her mirror matching ribbons to her complexion, wound and curled her hair
in becoming ways. Now her hands, hardened and callous as a boy's, were
coarse-skinned with broken nails, sometimes dirty, and her hair hung
rough from the confining teeth of a comb and a few bent pins. When in
flashes of retrospect she saw her old self, this pampered self of crisp
fresh frocks and thoughts moving demurely in the narrow circle of her
experience, it did not seem as if it could be the same Susan Gillespie.

All that made up the little parcel of her personality seemed gone. In
those days she had liked this and wanted that and forgotten and wanted
something else. Rainy weather had sent its ashen sheen over her spirit,
and her gladness had risen to meet the sun. She remembered the sudden
sweeps of depression that had clouded her horizon when she had drooped in
an unintelligible and not entirely disagreeable melancholy, and the
contrasting bursts of gayety when she laughed at anything and loved
everybody. Hours of flitting fancies flying this way and that, hovering
over chance incidents that were big by contrast with the surrounding
uneventfulness, the idleness of dropped hands and dreaming eyes, the
charmed peerings into the future--all were gone. Life had seized her in
a mighty grip, shaken her free of it all, and set her down where she felt
only a few imperious sensations, hunger, fatigue, fear of danger, love of
her father, and-- She pulled her thoughts to obedience with a sharp jerk
and added--love of David and hatred of Courant.

These two latter facts stood out sentinel-wise in the foreground. In the
long hours on horseback she went over them like a lesson she was trying
to learn. She reviewed David's good points, dwelt on them, held them up
for her admiration, and told herself no girl had ever had a finer or more
gallant lover. She was convinced of it and was quite ready to convince
an