She felt as if she might be "coming to it." Without calculating
the probabilities she saw clearly enough that if she married Conquest the
very act would furnish proof to Ford that her intervention in his affairs
had been without self-interest. It would even offer some proof to herself,
the sort of proof that strengthens the resolution and supports what is
tottering in the pride. Notwithstanding the valor with which she
struggled her victory over herself was not so complete that she could
contemplate the destruction of Ford's happiness with absolute confidence
in the purity of her motives in bringing it to ruin. It was difficult to
take the highest road when what was left of her own fiercest instincts
accompanied her on it. That she had fierce instincts she was quite aware.
It was not for nothing that she had been born almost beyond the confines
of the civilized earth, of parents for whom law and order and other men's
rights were as the dead letter. True, she was trying to train the
inheritance received from them to its finer purposes, as the vine draws
strange essences from a flinty soil and sublimates them into the
grape--but it was still their inheritance.
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