Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1916)

108 Photoplay Magazine of good works could hardly pay for the thing that had come to him. Stephen Holt in his triumph, pride, and humility, was very near to that state of feeling which produces "conversion," that revolution of all concepts and determinations towards "good." His natural hard cynicism was melted. He glimpsed hints -of deeper, higher things that the soul instincts of a million years had planted in him, but which he had derided and denied. He was emotionally ready for the crossroads of his life which he was so swiftly approaching. YING on her white bed in the dark, her •*— ' hot face pressed into the tear-wet pillow, June was trying to visualize life as it was now. She burned all over with a sense of stain, as if some dark angel in passing had branded her with an ineradicable mark. For long after flinging herself upon the bed she could not think. Her mind was a seething chaos over which boiled horror and shame for the thing she had done, and beneath which, grand and sweet as in the cosmic dawn, sounded the motif of creation. Loathe it with her reason as she did, she could not forget that moment in Holt's arms ; she could not despise him, try as she would. But she despised herself, and she feared him, shrank from the shock of the thing he had aroused, even as it tingled like wine in her blood. With a sickening sense of futile self-loathing, she knew that she would kiss him again did he hold her in his arms that instant. "What has happened to me? What has come over me?" she asked herself. "Do I love him? Do I feel this way only out of duty to Paul?" She did not know. She could not analyze then. She could only feel. Always having followed simple and straight lines of conduct based upon the normal conception of right, she yet found herself now helpless, all her conceptions and thoughts of love swept away by an obliterating fire. She had reverenced equally the trinity of love — body, mind and spirit, but now one element only seemed to exist, the flesh. But this was subsiding before conscience and the increasing shame of her treachery towards Paul, a shame which seemed to enclose her heart in a leaden ball. Ancestry and training had equipped her with a deep lovaltv and certain almost narrow convic tions. She was of the type to stand by her pledged troth in letter and spirit even though it meant disaster. Therefore, that she had failed in her plain duty was a crushing realization. A second, which emerged into it, was that in smirching herself, she had equally defiled Paul — a bitter thought when she remembered his clear and unquestioning faith in her. She recalled his letters, sweet with his happy, almost boyish pride and glory in her love, and in her unworthiness she wished she could die. She knew that he could never have failed as she had done, and that he believed her incapable of failing. The fact of her wrong would be hurt enough to him, — full well she knew that — but far more cruel and bitter would be the thought that she could have done so. She wept again, there in the dark, miserably, hopelessly, her body shaking with great agonized sobs. She wept for all that had been, for all that was to come. Remorse, regret, and pity for Paul, drowned her, but her honor, abnormally sensitive now, did not confuse this with an uprush of the old love. She was too fresh from Stephen Holt's arms for that. AND yet. condemning herself with the *"■ exaggerated censure of an unblunted conscience, she found, in all fairness, some defense for herself. She perceived for the first time how unsuspectedly it had all grown ; how. being wrapped up in the urgent exigencies of her new work, she had not been aware of the gradual, insidious development of her feeling for Holt. She could not surmise the skilful and determined siege he had undertaken and so clev erlv concealed. Looking back she could not put her finger on any one spot where she should or could have said, "No ! This ends everything." Especially at the Country Club when he had declared his love, had she rebuked him, reiterating her loyalty to Paul, and forbidding him ever again to speak of his passion. But she had thought of him, permitted him to permeate her life as a fragrance permeates the air. This was her sin, and an unconscious one. for she had not dreamed that all action first originates in thought, and that a human life is the reflection of its mental processes, the product of innumerable minute decisions