A few months ago I’d have been stricken with apprehension and compunction, but now I stood there, disregarding the hot blood steaming down my face and neck, a fierce alert triumph burning in the place of pity.

She had removed her cupped hand now and was blinking and grimacing. Suddenly she lurched to the chair her clothes lay on and flung them at me.

“Take them, take them all then, lice-spawn!”

As they sparkled to my feet she came at me with the last garment in her hand, the jacket stiff with raised gold thread, and seizing me before I realized what she was about she was grinding it into my back. It was far worse than any fistful of gravel could be and I had to bite my lip to prevent myself screaming. I was strongly held, there was nothing I could do but endure this merciless vengeance.

I thought it would last for eternity and when she stopped my nerves were still writhing exactly as though the torture were still continuing.

“Remember that for the rest of your life as you sleep sore in your fair boy’s arms,” she shispered.

I heard her dress and wrap rustle as she puffed them on and ran down the stairs and up the alley.

Weeping, I pulled back the hanging and looked down. An amber glowing beetle in the brick alley, scurrying along after the expression of a hate like a pus-filled sore always ready in her for this or that excuse, she seemed to me the most hideous thing in the world, I stooped and gathered up the shimmering skirt and blood-streaked jacket, holding them gingerly for I loathed their touch, and dropped them through the window. Behind her a group of gutter urchins without even looking up to see whence they had come fell on them dragging them from one another like animals and finally made off, some with the skirt, others with the jacket.

I turned slowly into the room again. I had not the strength to keep the hanging held up; I let it fall, shutting me in with the dreary, dank lack of light, and Smahil from whom I knew without testing it there would be no warmth, no compassion. I felt like a very old woman. I was tired, I wanted to sleep, and sleep, and sleep. To sleep; nevermore to aspire to anything, to accept with my numbed mind my degradation, the humiliation of all my divinity and the rare high hopes I had been fashioned and born for; to accept with my numbed senses the pain which lapped me and which I was too utterly eternally exhausted to try to soothe alone.

“Your creamy back will hold those marks to your dying day,” Smahil’s voice said. “She rubbed till her arm fell with the fatigue of it.”

From a long way I dragged my voice, “I have been whipped before.”