"She said it; she said it!" Ann muttered aloud. "She said that I was a hypocrite. She said ... she did not hide!" Then, for a moment, she was firm, drawing her body, even, to firmness to contend more effectively against these suggestive accusations. What matter if she were married? What if Bayard did love an abandoned woman? What mattered anything but that she loved him?
And, as though it had waited for her to go that far to show her hand, that other self cried out: "To your God you have given your word to love this man, your husband! To your God you have promised to love no other! To your God you have pledged him your body, your soul, your life, come what may!"
She cowered before the thought, tearless, silent, and sat there, going through and through the same emotional experiences, always coming against the stone wall formed by her concepts of honor and morality.
In another room of the Manzanita House another woman fought with herself that night. Nora, too, stood backed against her locked door a long time after she had gained its refuge, bewildered, trying to think her way to a clear understanding of all that had happened. Its entire consequence came to her sooner than it had come to Ann. She groped along the wall to her matchsafe, scratched a light, removed the chimney from her lamp and set the wick burning. She waved out the match absently, put the charred remains in the oilcloth cover of the washstand and said to herself,
It was as though she spoke of the accomplishment of an end the advisability of which had been debatable in her mind, and as if there were now no remedy. What was done, was done; events of the past could not be altered, their consequences could not be changed.
She undressed listlessly, put on her nightgown and moved to the crinkled mirror to take down her hair.
"I guess that'll fix her," she muttered. "She'll get out, now...."
She looked at herself in the mirror as she began to speak, but, when her sight met its own reflection, her voice faltered, the words trailed off. She stood motionless, scrutinizing herself closely, critically; then saw a slow flush come up from her neck, flooding her cheeks. Uneasily her eyes dropped from their reflection, then shot back with a rallying of the dark defiance that had been in them; only for an instant, for the fire disappeared, they became unsteady.