disgust, of spiritual loathing--the loathing of a creature that hates
the thing it loves.

"But it isn't worth it, it isn't worth it," she moaned, pushing the
papers away from her with an indignant gesture, and rising from her
chair to walk hurriedly up and down the floor. "It isn't worth it, but
I'm bound to it--I can't get away. I'm bound to the wheel. Do you think
if I could help myself--if I could be different--that I would turn into
a mere bond-slave to my body? Why, a day labourer has rest, but I
haven't. There's not a moment when I'm not doing something for my
beauty, or planning effects, or undergoing a treatment. I never sleep as
I want to, nor bathe as I want to, nor even eat what I like. It's all
somebody's system for preserving something about me. I've lived on
celery and apples to keep from growing fat and taken daily massage to
keep from getting thin--and yet I never wake up in the morning that I
don't turn sick for fear I'll discover my first wrinkle in the glass.
Now imagine," she finished with a cynical laugh, "Perry going upon a
diet for any sentimental reasons, or sacrificing terrapin in order to
retain my affection!"

"I can't," confessed Laura bluntly, "it's beyond me, but I wish you
wouldn't. I wish you'd try to hold him by something different--something
higher."

"You can't hold a person by what he hasn't got," returned Gerty with the
flippant ridicule she so desperately clung to--a ridicule which she used
as unsparingly upon herself as upon her husband. Then, after a pause,
she resumed her bitter musing in the same high-strung, reckless manner.
"A wrinkle would kill me," she pursued; "I'd rather endure any
agony--I'd be skinned alive first like some woman Perry laughed about.