Martha Kent's heavy drinking the night before, when her clubhouse
friends in a wild debauch had tried to help her to forget, was the
climax of many months of like excesses. The mood in which she had sent
the man Green from her room was the last despairing flicker of her
better instincts. Moved by her memories of better things,--of a better
love and dreams and ideals,--she had spent a little hour or two in
sentimental regret for that which she had so recklessly cast aside. And
then, because there was within her no foundation of abiding principle
for her sentiment, she had again put on the character which had so
separated her from the life of the man to whom she was married, indeed,
but with whom she was never one. With the burning consciousness of what
she might have been and of what she was ever tormenting her, she sank,
as the hours passed, deeper and deeper into the quicksands of physical
indulgence until, in her mad determination to destroy utterly her
ability to feel remorse, she lost all mental control of herself, and
responded to every insane whim of her drink-disordered brain.
As she stood there, now, in the doorway of that little log house by the
river,--face to face with the man and the woman who, though they
were united in their love, were yet separated by the very fact of her
existence,--she was, in all her hideous, but pitiful, repulsiveness, the
legitimate creation of those life-forces which she so fitly personified.
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