Live in them! Die in
them! They are your past, your present, your future. They are your hell,
your heaven. They are everything to you. I tell you that you are as much
of them as are the stones of the pavement that the feet of such women as
you tread night after night. And what soul can a street thing have? What
can be the will of a creature who gives herself to every man who beckons,
and who follows every voice that calls? I feared you. I might as well
have feared a shadow, an echo, a sigh of the wind, or the fall of an
autumn leaf. I might as well have feared that personal devil whom men
raise up for themselves as a bogey. Will is God! Will is the Devil! Will
is everything! And you--you, having tossed your will away--are nothing."
He had spoken gravely, even sombrely. On the last word he was gone.
The lady of the feathers stood alone in the ugly little room, and heard
the clock of the great church close by chime the hour of midnight. Her
face was set and white under its rouge, in its frame of disordered
canary-coloured hair. Her eyes were clouded with perplexity, with horror,
and with awe. Yet she looked undaunted. Staring at the door through which
the man men still called Valentine Cresswell had vanished, she whispered:
"It ain't true! It ain't! Nothin' does for a woman; not when she loves a
man! Nothin'.
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