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physically-glorious and morally-rotten woman. “Don’t touch me!”

Patricia smiled.

“Don’t be an ass, Jimmy,” she begged. “What difference can it make to us if half the country is shaken to pieces?”

“But Grace—Grace is in Napier! Can’t you understand ?” he raved.

Patricia pretended to an unwelcome conviction that he really had not known of the disaster until now. Her lip curled in a slow sneer.

“So you are making this an excuse to back out?” she asked coldly. “You’ve decided to make this a plausible excuse to go back to Grace? You’re afraid.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, be decent!”

“What has decency to do with it?” she flared. “Grace left you to me. Talk to her of decency.”

“Think! Think!” he cried, in impassioned self-reproach, ignoring her taunt. “Grace, and little Joan, crushed!—buried!—burned! And you—we—behaving like animals! Like beasts!”

“And when you and I are both dead people will still behave like animals, Jimmy. What else are we? Five minutes ago you hoped never to see Grace and Joan again. They were then, as they are now,—crushed, buried and burned.”

“But, I didn’t know! I didn’t know!”

Again Patricia became the softly pleading, seductive woman.

“What does it matter, Jimmy?” she asked approaching him where he stood with his back to the wall and placing her hands timidly upon his breast. “Have they not been dead to you for weeks? Have you not hated them, deep in your heart, because they stood in the path to your real happiness, your path to me? Have you not felt unclean in the caresses you gave to Grace since you knew that they were rightly mine? And if Grace is dead, do