After them tumbled a confusion of artists and servants who were swallowed up, and the hall was filled only with music.
The woman by the lectern and the singer on the rostrum had chosen.

To live without beauty and to live without love were not possible to the one who had known beauty all his life, to the one who had learned love so late--after she had been beggared of her dowry of purity.
There was hardly an appreciable interval between the time of the desertion of her artists and the thunder of assault at her door, but in that space there passed before Amaryllis that useless retrospect which is death's recapitulation of the life it means to take.

And out of that long procession, she singled one conviction which made the step of the Roman on her threshold welcome.

It was an old, old moral, so old that it had never had weight with her, who believed it was time to reconstruct the whole artistic attitude of the world.
And that was why she waited impatiently at her doorway for death, which was a kinder thing than life..