It would once have aroused in her a contemptuous sense of her step-mother's hypocrisy, but now she felt too humbled herself to blame another, even to realize any fault in another.

She felt as if she had undergone a tremendous cataclysm of spirit, which had cast her forever from her judgment-seat as far as others were concerned.
Was she not deceiving as never Ida had deceived?
What would Ida say?
What would her father say if he knew that she was--?
She could not say the word even to herself.

When she was in bed and her light out, she was overcome by a nervous stress which almost maddened her.

Faces seemed to glower at her out of the blackness of the night, faces which she knew were somehow projected out of her own consciousness, but which were none the less terrific.

She even heard her name shouted, and strange, isolated words, and fragments of sentences.