ll to the floor, wept, implored, struggled,
called desperately for help. The empty house was deaf.

When she recovered consciousness, Germinie ran and shut herself up in
her chamber. She was not seen again that day. On the following day, when
Joseph walked toward her and attempted to speak to her, she recoiled
from him in dismay, with the gesture of a woman mad with fear. For a
long time, whenever a man approached her, her first involuntary impulse
was to draw back suddenly, trembling and nervous, like a terrified,
bewildered beast, looking about for means of flight. Joseph, who feared
that she would denounce him, allowed her to keep him at a distance, and
respected the horrible repugnance she exhibited for him.

She became _enceinte_. One Sunday she had been to pass the evening with
her sister, the concierge; she had an attack of vomiting, followed by
severe pain. A physician who occupied an apartment in the house, came to
the lodge for his key, and the sisters learned from him the secret of
their younger sister's condition. The brutal, intractable pride of the
common people in their honor, the implacable severity of rigid piety,
flew to arms in the two women and found vent in fierce indignation.
Their bewilderment changed to fury. Germinie recovered consciousness
under their blows, their insults, the wounds inflicted by their hands,
the harsh words that came from their mouths. Her brother-in-law was
there, who had never forgiven her the cost of her journey; he glanced at
her with a bantering expression, with the cunning, ferocious joy of an
Auvergnat, with a sneering laugh that dyed the girl's cheeks a deeper
red than her sisters' blows.

She received the blows, she did not repel the insults. She sought
neither to defend nor to excuse herself. She did not tell what had taken
place and how little her own desires had had to do with her misfortune.
She was dumb: she had a vague hope that they would kill her. When her
older sister asked her if there had been no violence, and reminded her
that there were police officers and courts, she closed her eyes at the
thought of publishing her shame. For one instant only, when her
mother's memory was cast in her face, she emitted a glance, a lightning
flash from her eyes, by which the two women felt their consciences
pierced; they remembered that they were the ones who had placed her and
kept her in that den, and had exposed her to the danger, nay, had almost
forced her into her m