Yet why had she faltered and hesitated, at such a moment, she demanded of herself. This she could not fully answer. She was becoming enigmatic, even to herself. And already it was too late to draw back—even the tantalizing dream of withdrawal was now a mockery. For, once, she had thought that life was a single straight thread; now she knew it to be a mottled fabric in which the past is woven and bound up with the future, in which tangled tomorrows and yesterdays make up the huddled cloth. She writhed, in her agony of mind, at the thought that she had no one to whom to open her soul. This she had always shrunk from doing before Durkin (and that, she warned herself, was an ill omen) and there had been no one else to whom she could go for comradeship and consolation. Then she began making excuses for herself, feebly, at first, more passionately as she continued her preoccupied pacing of the floor. She was only one of many. Women, the most jealously guarded and the most softly shrouded women had erred. And, after all, much lay in the point of view. What was criminality from one aspect, was legitimate endeavor from another. All life, she felt, was growing more feverish, more competitive, more neuropathic, more potentially and dynamically criminal. She was a leaf on the current of the time.
And her only redemption now, she told herself, was to continue along that course in a manner which would lend dignity, perhaps even the glorified dignity of tragedy itself, to what must otherwise be a squalid and sordid life. Since she was in the stream, she must strike out for the depths, not cringe and whimper among the shallows. By daring and adventuring, audaciously, to the uttermost, that at least could still lend a sinister radiance to her wrong-doing. That alone could make excuse for those whimpering and snivelling sensibilities which would not keep to the kennel of her heart.
Yet it was only the flesh that was weak and faltering, she argued—and in an abstracted moment she remembered how even a greater evil-doer than she herself had buoyed her will to endure great trial. “_That which hath made them drunk hath made me bold_,” she repeated to herself, inspirationally, as she remembered the small medicine-flask of cognac which she carried in her toilet bag.