it, from within.
We're cared for, never doubt. Aide-toi. Be ready dressed to help
yourself in a calamity, or you'll not stand in boots at your next
Sermon, contrasting with the burnt. That sounds like the moral.'

'She could have seen me,' Victor threw out an irritable suggestion. The
idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.

'Scarcely likely. I'm told she sits looking on her lap, under the
beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a
mixture that strikes her fancy. It's possible to do more suicidal things
than sit the afternoons in a chemist's shop and see poor creatures get
their different passports to Orcus.'

Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of
chemical wash. The woman might be inside there now! She might have
seen his figure in the shop-mirror! And she there! The wonder of it all
seemed to be, that his private history was not walking the streets.
The thinness of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day's
immunity: because this woman would live in London, in order to have
her choice of a central chemist's shop, where she could feed a ghastly
imagination on the various recipes... and while it would have been so
much healthier for her to be living in a recess of the country!

He muttered: 'Diseases--drugs!'

Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the
woman going.

'And deadly spite.' That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible
conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.

In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through
the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.

A little further on, he said: 'Poor soul!' He confessed to himself, that
latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous
in thought, as never before. He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque
tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and
Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving. He accused her of dragging
him down to humanity's lowest.

But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.

Her station in the chemist's shop he passed almost daily, appeared to
him as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was only a
short drive from the house in Regent's Park; but having shaken-off
that house, he had pushed it back into mists, obliterated it. The woman
certainly had a power.

He shot away to the power he knew of in himself; his