She had felt that he would
understand and pity her, and his accusing eyes hurt her sorely. "If I
could only speak? If I could only find words to tell him my thought, he
would at least not despise me," she thought. Her face turned toward him
piteously, but she dared not lift her eyes to his. He typified the world
to her, and, furthermore, he was kindly and just; and yet he was about
to condemn her because she could not make him understand.
Trained to laugh when she should weep, how could she plead overmastering
desire, the pressure of loneliness and poverty, and, last of all, the
power of a man who stood, in her fancy, among the most brilliant of her
world. She felt herself in the grasp of forces as vast, as impersonal,
and as illimitable as the wind and the sky, but, reduced to words, her
poor plea for mercy would have been, "I could not help it."
Her maternity, which should have been her glory and her pride, was at
this hour an insupportable shame. She had experienced her moments of
emotional exaltation wherein she was lifted above self-abasement, but
now she crouched in the lowest depths of self-suspicion.
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