But as if even this last ugliness of attitude were intolerable to her, she fought against the chair and the table, and pushed and slid backward till her head was erect. And she was whispering courage to herself, hoarsely:
"Come—come—Persis!"
She seemed to be trying to die like a thoroughbred, a good loser.
And then her head rolled back in the billows of her hair, with the jeweled crown pointing downward and her eyes staring upward. Her wan, pouting, parted lips and the long arch of her perfect throat were themselves a prayer for mercy, offering up beauty as its own undoing and its own excuse.
She was dead.