"For God's sake--you're killing me--don't you know it?
I can't stand it any longer!"

"Don't!" she whispered, terror-stricken, straining away from him. "Mr.
Ditmar--let me go!"

A silent struggle ensued, she resisting him with all the aroused strength
and fierceness of her nature. He kissed her hair, her neck,--she had
never imagined such a force as this, she felt herself weakening,
welcoming the annihilation of his embrace.

"Mr. Ditmar!" she cried. "Somebody will come in."

Her fingers sank into his neck, she tried to hurt him and by a final
effort flung herself free and fled to the other side of the room.

"You little--wildcat!" she heard him exclaim, saw him put his
handkerchief to his neck where her fingers had been, saw a red stain on
it. "I'll have you yet!"

But even then, as she stood leaning against the wall, motionless save for
the surging of her breast, there was about her the same strange, feral
inscrutableness. He was baffled, he could not tell what she was thinking.
She seemed, unconquered, to triumph over her disarray and the agitation
of her body. Then, with an involuntary gesture she raised her hands to
her hair, smoothing it, and without seeming haste left the room, not so
much as glancing at him, closing the door behind her.

She reached her table in the outer office and sat down, gazing out of the
window. The face of the world--the river, the mills, and the bridge--was
changed, tinged with a new and unreal quality. She, too, must be changed.
She wasn't, couldn't be the same person who had entered that room of
Ditmar's earlier in the afternoon! Mr. Caldwell made a commonplace
remark, she heard herself answer him. Her mind was numb, only her body
seemed swept by fire, by emotions--emotions of fear, of anger, of desire
so intense as to make her helpless. And when at length she reached out
for a sheet of carbon paper her hand trembled so she could scarcely hold
it. Only by degrees was she able to get sufficient control of herself to
begin her copying, when she found a certain relief in action--her hands
flying over the keys, tearing off the finished sheets, and replacing them
with others. She did not want to think, to decide, and yet she
knew--something was trying to tell her that the moment for decision had
come. She must leave, now. If she stayed on, this tremendous adventure
she longed for and dreaded was inevitable. Fear and fascination battled
within her. To run away was to deny life; to re