“Allie Lee! ...  At my house!” burst out Stanton, and then, as if struck by lightning she grew cold, stiff-lipped.

The change in Neale was swift, terrible.  Not comprehension, but passion transformed him into a gray-faced man, amazed, furious, agonized, acting in seeming righteous and passionate repudiation of a sacrilege.

“------!” His voice hurled out a heinous name, the one epithet that
could inflame and burn and curl Beauty Stanton’s soul into hellish
revolt.  Gray as ashes, fire-eyed, he appeared about to kill her.  He
struck her—­hard—­across the mouth.

“Don’t breathe that name!”

Beauty Stanton’s fear suddenly broke.  Blindly she ran out into the street.  She fell once—­jostled against a rail.  The lights blurred; the street seemed wavering; the noise about her filtered through deadened ears; the stalking figures before her were indistinct and unreal.

“He struck me!  He called me------!” she gasped.  And the exaltation
of the last hour vanished as if it had never been.  All the passion
of her stained and evil years leaped into ascendency.  “Hell—­hell! 
I’ll have him knifed—­I’ll see him dying!  I’ll wet my hands in his
blood!  I’ll spit in his face as he dies!”

So she gasped out, staggering along the street toward her house.  There is no flame of hate so sudden and terrible and intense as that of the lost woman.  Beauty Stanton’s blood had turned to vitriol.  Men had wronged her, ruined her, dragged her down into the mire.  One by one, during her dark career, the long procession of men she had known had each taken something of the good and the virtuous in her, only to leave behind something evil in exchange.  She was what they had made her.  Her soul was a bottomless gulf, black and bitter as the Dead Sea.  Her heart was a volcano, seething, turgid, full of contending fires.  Her body was a receptacle into which Benton had poured its dregs.  The weight of all the iron and stone used in the construction of the great railroad was the burden upon her shoulders.  These dark streams of humanity passing her in the street, these beasts of men, these hairy-breasted toilers, had found in her and her kind the strength or the incentive to endure, to build, to go on.  And one of them, stupid, selfish, merciless, a man whom she had really loved, who could have made her better, to whom she had gone with only hope for him and unselfish abnegation for herself—­he had put a vile interpretation upon her appeal, he had struck her before a callous crowd, he had called her the name for which there was no pardon from her class, a name that evoked all the furies and the powers of hell.

“Oh, to cut him—­to torture him—­to burn him alive ...  But it would not be enough!” she panted.

And into the mind that had been lately fixed in happy consciousness of her power of good there flashed a thousand scintillating, corruscating gleams of evil thought.  And then came a crowning one, an inspiration straight from hell.