She turned the corner of the main street and glided among the
hurrying throng. Men stood in groups, talking excitedly. She
gathered that there had been fights. More than once she was
addressed familiarly, but she did not hear what was said. The wide
street seemed strange, dark, dismal, the lights yellow and flaring,
the wind burdened, the dark tide of humanity raw, wild animal,
unstable. Above the lights and the throngs hovered a shadow--not the
mantle of night nor the dark desert sky.
Her steps took familiar ground, yet she seemed not to know this
Benton.
"Once I was like Allie Lee!" she whispered. "Not so many years ago."
And the dark tide of men, the hurry and din, the wind and dust, the
flickering lights, all retreated spectral--like to the background of
a mind returned to youth, hope, love, home. She saw herself at
eighteen--yes, Beauty Stanton even then, possessed of a beauty that
was her ruin; at school, the favorite of a host of boys and girls;
at home, where the stately oaks were hung with silver moss and the
old Colonial house rang with song of sister and sport of brother,
where a sweet-faced, gentle-voiced mother--
"Ah ... Mother!" And at that word the dark tide of men seemed to
rise and swell at her, to trample her sacred memory as inevitably
and brutally as it had used her body.
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