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Never-Fail Blake by Arthur Stringer
page 6 of 193 (03%)
marshaled the last of his own animal strength and essayed the final
blasphemous Vesuvian onslaught that brought about the nervous
breakdown, the ultimate collapse. She had wept, then, the blubbering,
loose-lipped, abandoned weeping of hysteria. She had stumbled forward
and caught at his arm and clung to it, as though it were her last
earthly pillar of support. Her huge plaited ropes of hair had fallen
down, thick brown ropes longer than his own arms, and he, breathing
hard, had sat back and watched them as she wept.

But Blake was neither analytical nor introspective. How it came about
he never quite knew. He felt, after his blind and inarticulate
fashion, that this scene of theirs, that this official assault and
surrender, was in some way associated with the climacteric transports
of camp-meeting evangelism, that it involved strange nerve-centers
touched on in rhapsodic religions, that it might even resemble the
final emotional surrender of reluctant love itself to the first
aggressive tides of passion. What it was based on, what it arose from,
he could not say. But in the flood-tide of his own tumultuous conquest
he had watched her abandoned weeping and her tumbled brown hair. And
as he watched, a vague and troubling tingle sped like a fuse-sputter
along his limbs, and fired something dormant and dangerous in the great
hulk of a body which had never before been stirred by its explosion of
emotion. It was not pity, he knew; for pity was something quite
foreign to his nature. Yet as she lay back, limp and forlorn against
his shoulder, sobbing weakly out that she wanted to be a good woman,
that she could be honest if they would only give her a chance, he felt
that thus to hold her, to shield her, was something desirable.

She had stared, weary and wide-eyed, as his head had bent closer down
over hers. She had drooped back, bewildered and unresponsive, as his
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