In the following days she moved as if the dust cloud that inclosed her
was an impenetrable medium that interposed itself between her and the
weird setting of the way. She was drugged with the wine of a new life.
She did not think of sin, of herself in relation to her past, of the
breaking with every tie that held her to her old self. All her
background was gone. Her conscience that, in her dealings with David,
had been so persistently lively, now, when it came to herself, was
dead. Question of right or wrong, secret communings, self judgment,
had no place in the exaltation of her mood. To look at her conduct and
reason of it, to do anything but feel, was as impossible for her as it
would have been to disengage her senses from their tranced
concentration and restore them to the composed serenity of the past.
It was not the sudden crumbling of a character, the collapse of a
structure reared on a foundation of careful training. It was a logical
growth, forced by the developing process of an environment with which
that character was in harmony. Before she reached the level where she
could surrender herself, forgetful of the rites imposed by law,
unshocked by her lover's brutality, she had been losing every ingrafted
and inherited modification that had united her with the world in which
she had been an exotic.
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