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.
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