fields in the soft night, where starlight, and the cool breath sifting down from the mountain-peaks, and the murmur of the streams, quieted after a time her racked nerves. It was not altogether clear to her why this event should disurb her so deeply, why she should so hate the whole affair and want passionately as she did to erase it from her mind. Above all she desired that Crayven should not know of it, and she wondered how much he did know. At least he would not speak of it.
But she knew what he would think of it, what Basil would think, what any man she knew would think—the light contempt that would be Edith's portion from them all. Men were harder on women than other women, she thought. No man was above taking his advantage from a woman's weakness—none that would not despise her for it after. Men were more conventional than women, she thought. Basil was conventional in that way, Crayven undoubtedly was. …
There was the other side, too. Women took terrible revenges. There were men possessed, as Egisto was, by a passion that carried hatred with it, a pure torment. There were women who reached out for men, captured them perhaps for a month or a year—as Isabel had done. Only in this case, too, the woman usually got the worst of it. Isabel, she was fairly sure, had got the worst of it. What could a woman do, in fact, and
