THE NINTH MAN
headily within her that made her beloved by all, this and her joy in play, for she played as eagerly as children play, sometimes with a child's serious eyes and sometimes with a child's laughter.
When her gaiety was at its height she seemed like some wild thing, and those who beheld it must needs run after it. It was like a flashing and scarlet thing. None of this, nor tenderness, was for my lord. This change, so Simonetta said, had come from one day to another.
All these things came tumbling through my mind as I traversed the corridors with Father Giorgio, he shaking as with the ague. As he got in his room he turned to me and said: "She has drunken too deeply of the loathing horror of life. This loathing has shaped her into a frightful, tortured thing, and there is no forgetting for her. I know the very night when the flesh of her became so degraded in her sight that she would have rejoiced in a purifying fire that mercifully could have burned it from her. But he did what he did in anger."
He stopped, and then as though he must tell, to relieve his mind of some intolerable
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