walked to her mirror and looked at herself. There were the fine,
familiar outlines of face and figure; there were the same splendid eyes;
but a certain charm beyond the power of "grooming" to restore was gone.
An incipient, almost invisible, brood of wrinkles was gathering about
her eyes; there was a loss of freshness of complexion, and an expression
of weariness and age, which, in the repose of reflection and
inquisition, almost startled her.

Her youth was gone, and, with it, the most potent charms of her person.
She was hated and suspected by her own sex, and sought by men for no
reason honorable either to her or to them. She saw that it was all, at
no distant day, to have an end, and that when the end should come, her
life would practically be closed. When the means by which she had held
so many men in her power were exhausted, her power would cease. Into the
blackness of that coming night she could not bear to look. It was full
of hate, and disappointment, and despair. She knew that there was a
taint upon her--the taint that comes to every woman, as certainly as
death, who patently and purposely addresses, through her person, the
sensuous element in men. It was not enough for her to remember that she
despised the passion she excited, and contemned the men whom she
fascinated. She knew it was better to lead even a swine by a golden
chain than by the ears.

She reviewed her relations to Mr. Belcher. That strong, harsh, brutal
man, lost alike to conscience and honor, was in her hands. What should
she do with him? He was becoming troublesome. He was not so easily
managed as the most of her victims. She knew that, in his heart, he was
carrying the hope that some time in the future, in some way, she would
become his; that she had but to lift her finger to make the Palgrave
mansion so horrible a hell that the wife and mother would fly from it in
indignant despair. She had no intention of doing this. She wished for no
more intimate relation with her victim than she had already established.

There was one thing in which Mr. Belcher had offended and humiliated
her. He had treated her as if he had fascinated her. In his stupid
vanity, he had fancied that his own personal attractions had won her
heart and her allegiance, and that she, and not himself, was the victim.
He had tried to use her in the accomplishment of outside purposes; to
make a tool of her in carrying forward his mercenary or knavish ends.
Other men had strive