Which is akin to resentment. And to these it is easy to ally recklessness.
There came to her a moment, as she sat huddled there at the window, when endurance suddenly flashed into a white anger; and she found herself on her feet, pacing the room as caged things pace, with a sort of blindly fixed purpose, seeing everything yet looking at nothing that she passed.
But after this had lasted long enough she halted, gazing about her as though for something that might aid her. But there was only the room and the furniture, and Hafiz asleep on a chair; only these and the crystal sphere on its slim bronze tripod. And suddenly she found herself on her knees beside it, staring into its dusky transparent depths, fixing her mind, concentrating every thought, straining every faculty, every nerve in the one desperate and imperative desire.
But through the crystal's depths there is no aid for those who "see clearly," no comfort, no answer. She could not find there the man she searched for—the man for whom her soul cried out in fear, in anger, in despair. As in a glass, darkly, only her own face she saw, fire-edged with a light like that which burns deep in black opals.
Prone on the floor at last, her white face framed by her hands, her eyes wide open in the dark, she finally understood that her clear vision was of no avail where
she herself was concerned; that they who see clearly can never use that vision to help themselves.
Fiercely she resented it,—the more bitterly because for the first time in her life she had condescended to any voluntary effort toward clairvoyance.
Wearily she sat up on the floor and gathered her knees into her arms, staring at nothing there in the darkness while the slow tears fell.
Never before had she known loneliness. A man had made her understand it. Never before had she known bitterness. A man had taught it to her. Never again should any man do what this man had done to her! She was learning resentment.