Not the Manger of
Immortal Purity for mankind but the manger of his own bestiality.
Thus scorn and satire became her speech; she soared above him with
spurning; a frenzy of poisoned joy racked her that at the moment when
he had let her know that he wanted to be free--at that moment she
might tell him he had won his freedom at the cheap price of his
unworthiness.
And thus as she descended, she enjoyed the triumph of rising; so the
devil in us never lacks argument that he is the celestial guide.
Moreover, hatred never dwells solitary; it readily finds boon
companions. And at one period of the night she began to look back upon
her experience with a curious sense of prior familiarity--to see it as
a story already known to her at second hand. She viewed it as the
first stage of one of those tragedies that later find their way into
the care of family physicians, into the briefs of lawyers, into the
confidence of clergymen, into the papers and divorce courts, and that
receive their final flaying or canonization on the stage and in novels
of the time. Sitting at a distance, she had within recent years
studied in a kind of altruistic absorption how the nation's press, the
nation's science of medicine, the nation's science of law, the
nation's practice of religion, and the nation's imaginative literature
were all at work with the same national omen--the decay of the
American family and the downfall of the home.
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