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CHAPTER EIGHT


Since thinness of skin seems to stand an immediate though unhappy corollary to blueness of blood, Theodora Lydia Lorillard Hayden, being an aristocrat, even if one under protest, found herself without that indurated armor which protects her humbler fellow-beings from the buffets and shocks of fate. So her spirit still winced at the thought of what she had passed through. Her body still alternately flushed with indignation and chilled with a tangle of fears. Something, she knew, was about to happen, was bound to happen. Yet what this was she had neither the power nor the inclination to fathom. She merely waited, sure only of the recurring waves of desolation which beat upon her soul. She even struggled to escape from this denuding loneliness, the next morning, by trying to lose herself in her work. But so small and

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