!" he said. "I'll buy you
pearls, Janet, I want to see them gleaming against your skin. She can't
compare to you. I'll--I'll drape you with pearls."

"No, no," she cried. "I don't want them, Claude. I don't want them.
Please!" She scarcely knew what she was saying. And as she drew away
from him her hands went out, were pressed together with an imploring,
supplicating gesture. He seized them. His nearness was suffocating her,
she flung herself into his arms, and their lips met in a long, swooning
kiss. She began instinctively but vainly to struggle, not against
him--but against a primal thing stronger than herself, stronger than
he, stronger than codes and conventions and institutions, which yet
she craved fiercely as her being's fulfilment. It was sweeping them
dizzily--whither? The sheer sweetness and terror of it!

"Don't, don't!" she murmured desperately. "You mustn't!"

"Janet--we're going to be married, sweetheart,--just as soon as we can.
Won't you trust me? For God's sake, don't be cruel. You're my wife,
now--"

His voice seemed to come from a great distance. And from a great
distance, too, her own in reply, drowned as by falling waters.

"Do you love me?--will you love me always--always?"

And he answered hoarsely, "Yes--always--I swear it, Janet." He had found
her lips again, he was pulling her toward a door on the far side of the
room, and suddenly, as he opened it, her resistance ceased....

The snow made automobiling impossible, and at half past nine that
evening Ditmar had escorted Janet to the station in a cab, and she had
taken the train for Hampton. For a while she sat as in a trance. She
knew that something had happened, something portentous, cataclysmic,
which had irrevocably changed her from the Janet Bumpus who had left
Hampton that same morning--an age ago. But she was unable to realize the
metamorphosis. In the course of a single day she had lived a lifetime,
exhausted the range of human experience, until now she was powerless
to feel any more. The car was filled with all sorts and conditions of
people returning to homes scattered through the suburbs and smaller
cities north of Boston--a mixed, Sunday-night crowd; and presently she
began, in a detached way, to observe them. Their aspects, their speech
and manners had the queer effect of penetrating her consciousness
without arousing the emotional judgments of approval or disapproval
which normally should have followed. Ordinarily she might h