Chapter XVII

MARY spent the next day reading _The Shareholder's Guide to Company Law_. She did not remember much of it when she had finished, but her aversion to James's proposals had increased. Once she had sold her part of the business in return for money or shares in the new company she would not be able to do anything--if she had read the book aright--without standing up at a General Meeting and delivering a speech. Of that, she felt, she was incapable. There would be not only James to fight, but the new shareholders. She pictured them as stout hard men who would laugh loudly at her. For a few moments she held this pleasant little nightmare in her mind and it decided her. Well then, she must not give way to James, she must refuse to sell.

It was easy in her queer, gaily coloured flat to feel capable of such defiance. It was less easy to think coherently about what James would say. With the thought of him and his offences her mind became confused. She could not envisage him calmly, she could not forget how different he was from the James whom she had loved. She decided that she was not prepared to consider him, and until the evening she put him, as far as she was able, out of her mind.

In the evening a large envelope came from the bank. It bore Trent's writing, and she opened it fearfully to find nothing inside it but some letters and the post-card from Rosemary. Rosemary, in Italy, was having lovely weather and getting on splendidly--as Mary put the post-card down she felt a kindlier feeling towards James. It was generous of him to have sent on her letters. It occurred to her suddenly that with all his faults James had always been generous to her, and often sympathetic. Whatever credit was due to him for that he still deserved--the fact that one is deceiving a person does not make it easier to sympathise with them.

Next day when she awoke in her room,--Chinese blue, sea-green, and indigo, not the colours she would herself have chosen for a bedroom, but stimulating in the early morning,--she came to the conclusion that she had been a little unjust to James. She had taken it for granted that ever since his fall his whole relation with her had been built up of fraud and hypocrisy. Now she could see that she had certainly been wrong. For a month or two James must have suffered from a waning uneasiness, after that he had probably taken his guilt for granted. If he had been kind to her it had been because he was naturally kind. She need not feel that she had been insulted by every different instance of his affection.

She was astonished with herself now for not having understood this before. She had made the discovery of his fault, she reflected, at an unfortunate moment. The more she thought of it, the more sure she felt that James had not let his adventure alter his affection for his wife. The different planes of James's being were unconnected, his mind was not logical. She reminded herself that she had not lived with him for twenty-seven years without getting a glimpse of his attitude towards his business. The business--she turned over restlessly--the business was a problem less easy of solution. For James's infidelity she had simply to forgive him, and within a week he would have forgotten it. But his business was his life.

She must, she told herself, be more energetic. She must not trust to the chance thoughts of the moment. She must sit down on the red and orange sofa, absurd as it might seem, and make herself think, or she would find herself sliding into some plausible position that had no solid reasoning to support it. And by and by she would need solid reasoning--when it came to explaining her conclusions to James. If she could not think yet, she could read, and read she must.

As she became more intimately acquainted, in the week that followed, with what the London Library could tell her of our industrial system, she found her conception of her problem alter. She could laugh now, a little drearily, at the thought of James heading a band of willing but ignorant employers. The facts she learned now were not different in kind from the facts she had known when she invented that pleasing legend, but her attitude towards them was changed. She had not to fit them into her ideal notion of James. Not that he, in this new light, appeared any more a harsh or dishonest man than the majority of the gentlemen who direct the creation of our country's wealth. In some ways, indeed, he seemed even better than they. He might treat his employees badly, but he did not cheat the public. To Mary, that seemed, on the whole, the lesser virtue, but she recognised that to James it might fairly be a cause for pride.

James did not consider himself a cruel employer, and he did not consider himself, either, a hypocrite or a man of loose morals. He seemed to himself, as he seemed to other men, a generous and honourable person. To her, and by her standards, on the contrary, he did not seem so, and the world respected her standards too. She was a good woman, with a good woman's point of view. The world does not like to see a woman uphold immorality, or starve her servants in order to make money. Nevertheless, when James did these things, she was bound, according to the world's judgment, to forgive him, or give way to him, as the case might be. Men praised her stricter standard as long as she applied it to nobody but herself.

For a moment of one darkening winter's afternoon it seemed to Mary that men stood before her, stripped of all but their wickedness, as they might have stood before Miss Percival. Men's chief demand of women was that they should be pleasing when men had time to think of them and quiet when men had not; to this end then women were to keep themselves busy practising a morality too exacting for men themselves. It would be a sad world without virtue, therefore let others be virtuous--from a business point of view an excellent argument. The poor lady paced her room in the painful agitation of one who discovers that he has played the part of a dupe.

But she could not believe, for long, that the whole fabric of her morals had been raised in obedience to a conspiracy. She was not virtuous, after all, because men imposed virtue on her. She had never wanted to be anything else. She could not bear, knowingly, to treat people cruelly, and as for sex, one husband and one family had occupied her fully. She was free now, but the life that was left to her could hardly be troubled by any such adventures. James, on the other hand, had not been so quietly content with virtue. She remembered now, though she had not attended to it at the time, a long defence that James had tried to make. She, he had said, had never attended to what he wanted, had never known or cared. She had merely assumed that his wants were like her own.

It was growing dark, and the city below her great leaded window showed black and yellow. She stopped her pacing to turn on the light, for she needed in her confusion the gay reassurance of the beautiful room. The light that collected its shining colours seemed to illumine her distress, making it less formidable, though not yet, alas, more clear.

She sat down in one of the painted chairs and smoothed the habitual grey silk that covered her knees. She was trying to remember what it was that James had said. He had said that lies--the lies he had told her--were the price he had had to pay for her comfort of mind and ignorance of evil--something to that purpose, at any rate, her memory was not exact. That, of course, when she thought it over, fitted in very well as part of the theory. Virtue and innocence are artificial, to be preserved only by ignorance of the world. Women, therefore, if they remain virtuous, must sympathise with men's temptations while carefully refusing to understand them. A man cannot help being tempted--that had been the burden of James's excuse--and there may come a point, of course, when he is but human. A woman, on the other hand, presumably can, since no temptation must be too strong for her. A good woman, obviously, is not tempted; if she felt the desires of men she would be, at heart, a wicked woman, not the sort of woman that James would have cared to marry. So he had married a good woman, and her goodness had gone to make things hard for him.

Mary, who detested cynicism, was dismayed by these thoughts.

Roughly, though, she told herself, they were true. James had certainly liked her to be the type of woman she was. He loved her for it, he preferred her even to his less ignorant though equally virtuous daughters. Mary wondered what Rosemary thought of it all. Mary, at Rosemary's age, had thought of nothing--Rosemary had probably reduced the whole thing to a theory. She had certainly horrified James on one occasion by saying that our divorce laws are scandalous; probably she believed in free love, whatever that might be--it was not a thing that Mary had ever pictured to herself. Fortunately it was not of much importance what Rosemary believed--she was a dear, good girl under all her modernity and could be trusted not to act on her convictions.

Mary had hardly had time to take comfort from this reassurance when a new possibility occurred to her. Supposing--impossible though it was--that Rosemary could not be trusted! Supposing she behaved exactly as James had done, that she became the mistress of another man after her marriage without telling Anthony. From one point of view the cases were parallel--whatever codes the world might accept for a man, Mary would never have married James if she had thought that he was free to deceive her. What would James have said to that?--her lip curled at the thought of his hypocritical horror; it was only afterwards that she asked herself what her own attitude would have been. Deceit, of course, is always terrible, there can be no doubt of it, but she couldn't doubt, either, that she would have forgiven Rosemary. She would have forgiven her and she would have thought Anthony a brute if he had not forgiven her too. She would have advised Rosemary, as a matter of course, to tell Anthony--well, James had told her. He had told her when he might have lied to her. She would not have believed him, but she could hardly have insisted against his denial. Unwillingly she faced a further question--would she have counselled Rosemary to tell Tony if she knew beforehand that he would not forgive? Might not she have said, even though she knew it was wrong, "It's all over my dear, you must think of the future now, and not of the past?" Tony, of course, might have divorced Rosemary--and she had run away from James.

She jumped up and went over to the window--"Very well then, very well then," her thoughts ran, "but where is your standard? Where is the basis of your judgments? How can you say, in the face of this, that you have not been cruel? What would you think if Anthony treated your daughter as you have treated James!"

Mary sat down again on the low window-ledge and looked out into the darkness. Far below her lights were moving in the cleft of the narrow street. She did not see them, or London that lay spread out towards the east. Where was her standard then, how could she decide? It had seemed easy enough to judge men and women, their virtues and their sins, but in the narrow circle of her own life justice eluded her. She had been angry with James; she had only thought of shielding Rosemary from an irresponsible and cruel world. James, after all, she told herself in excuse, was a man, a master of life. Men had made the world to please themselves, James should not have needed her protection from it. But this argument was not very convincing. James had not created modern morals: in such a sphere he was decidedly a person who took things as he found them, and if that was a sin, she, until now, had sinned as well as James.

She tried, for a short time, to reconcile her opposing points of view by the discovery of some subtler, loftier moral rule into which they might be harmoniously absorbed. She could not believe that she, a good woman, a fair-minded woman, could ultimately treat so differently a husband who sinned against her and a daughter who sinned against another person. It was only reasonable, she told herself, to assume that some reconciling system existed. This is not, after all, the first century of man's sojourn on the earth, nor his first attempt at building a civilisation. Somewhere the wisdom of the ages must have evolved a rational and merciful attitude towards human sin.

Mary searched her experience for this attitude but she did not find it. Her acquaintances, on the whole, went no nearer to discussion of the matter than scandal, and Mary was not able, looking back, to find any ethical system beneath their judgments. They forgave the people they pitied and the people they feared--anyone, in fact, whom they wanted to forgive--and they condemned the unfortunates whose affairs were mentioned when they were in a mood for condemnation. The more she thought of them, the more sure Mary felt that she could not have exposed her daughter to their comments. She must find, she decided, some more stable body of opinion, less tainted by laxity and recklessness of thought.

She sought in all seriousness, only to be shocked by the perversity and frivolity of her own mind. She knew very little about the ethics of mankind, and the first really definite system that occurred to her was that of the Mahommedans, who believe--she did not really know much about the Mahommedans--that a man may do as he pleases, but a woman who sins should be shut up in a sack and thrown into the Bosphorus. That came pretty near on the whole, she concluded, thinking it over, to our own English practice, though perhaps, since it was more drastic, it might be more effective in securing womanly virtue, but she did find herself able to accept it on that account. Then there were the Puritans--she could fairly take them as representing the theory of good people to-day. Anyone who disobeys the moral precepts of the English churches should, if not executed at once, be punished and made miserable for the rest of his life. There was something to be said for such a stringency, if only it could be enforced--Mary wished she knew more of the state of morals under the Ironsides and Oliver Cromwell. If we all really believed that, she wondered, so that all virtuous or cowardly or prudent people acted upon it, would the world be the richer for the triumph of their hatred and contempt? Would the groans of its backsliders be truly edifying? Then she stopped herself. She was being unfair again. The churches were always ready to rejoice over the sinner who repented--was it repentance, then, that she must ask alike of James and Rosemary before she forgave them and hid their wickedness from the eyes of the world?

For a moment she thought that she had found what she was seeking, then her spirits sank. How could anybody possibly tell whether James had repented or not? He would say that he had repented--he would even believe it--but what would he mean more than that he could not bear to see his Mary unhappy and did not intend, if he could help it, to hurt her again? James was not a man who ever repented, he merely put provoking matters out of his mind. And she could not imagine him comforted, either, by the rejoicings of the Churches.

For the first time she felt fully the deficiencies of her early education. She did not even know what her parents had learned from their lives--her mother, of course, had been a really nice woman, but her father must have held views of some sort upon so important a question. She had always thought of him as ennobled and distinguished by the breadth and the abundance of his views.... It was not long before, from the dim confusion of the past, a memory of her father came back to her. It had been an accepted fact that Mary never understood any sentences that she might overhear as she passed the half-open door of Mr. Trent's study, and since she was a modest and loyal girl she had not understood them, but now she remembered clearly her father's thin, amiable voice explaining to some friend whom she could not see that Christian morals were the invention of astute and envious monks. Monks had no use for a happy and virtuous people: they needed a race of sinners cowed by the fear of hell. Otherwise what place was there for the Church's ministrations?

She did not believe that this could be true, she deplored the accident that had presented her with such an example of her dear father's thoughts, but that a good clever man like him could believe such terrible things seemed to show that the whole question must be in confusion. She did not suppose, in that case, that she was likely to solve it. If everyone were alike, to begin with, and everyone could marry, and marry young, and all marriages turned out happily, then there would be something to go upon. But as it was she did not find in her own thoughts the least germ of a solution.

She did find, however, a growing shame at her own harshness, a realisation of her own ignorance. It was not only Cromwell and the Turks about whom she knew nothing. She knew nothing of modern men, or modern life, she did not know the force or the nature of love, or what place there is left for it in a driven and burdened world. She did not even know why her own husband had deceived her. And she did not believe that she would ever know. Now that she was released from the strain of her wrath against James, from the rigidity of her injured virtue, she decided, with an immense relief, that she might put the whole matter from her mind. Rosemary and her friends might study things of this sort, might draw their conclusions from evidence that to Mary was unimaginable. Rosemary was a modern woman, fearless of truth. To Mary truth was less than reticence. She could not, she realised, discuss such subjects frankly, even with herself. It was her duty, therefore, since she shrank from the knowledge without which judgment is only prejudice, to admit her own ignorance and be merciful. She saw now that James, even while he deceived her, had not been a monster but a human being, acting as human beings act--because they are kind, because they are afraid, because the small words and deeds of everyday life have made a chain for them. There was no need for her to be angry with James. The existing state of affairs might permit him, though he was her husband, to sin, but it had also enabled James to give his wife twenty-seven years of happiness and freedom from care. In all those years she had not bought her right to be angry with him by a single sacrifice, or a single protest. To keep her happiness intact James had disabled his clerks from marrying and driven his girls on to the streets. She had not even cared to find out that this was so. And when, at last, she had known, she had not acted. She had argued a little with James, and then given way. When her ignorance had disappeared she had found another method, wifely obedience, of shutting out the thought of suffering. In the beginning, she remembered, she had not wished to follow James's suggestion because she had been afraid that he and Trent might come to think badly of her. They had thought badly--and she had been terrified. The girls might be crippled by standing or die of consumption, but she, whose profits they made, must keep James's good opinion. Let James deceive her, however, let him give another woman a little of the love and the money he had promised her, and virtue gave her strength. She hated him, she was furious with him, though she tried she could not forgive him--it had been simple to forgive him his sins against others!

Her thoughts ran easily down the familiar channels of self-reproach. About James's sin she had not been able to think either justly or coherently--she had struggled in vain against the repulsion she felt for such a subject. But now, when she had only to blame herself, the power of her mind came quickly back to her.

She could not doubt, she decided now, that in the matter of the girls she was more to blame than James. His attitude, that had seemed to her so callous, was due she thought now to a fact beyond his control, the fact of his being a man. For men, after all, are not like women. They have different ideals and different standards of value. They do not think as women do in terms of health and happiness, but in terms of knowledge, of riches, of power. She checked herself and went through that again--she must build up her argument carefully for she was dealing now with unfamiliar notions. A clever man is more, she told herself, than a person, a husband, a father, the centre of various personal relations. He is the guardian, the vehicle, of an idea. He wants to impose this idea of his on his environment, to work it out, to see it take form; and for a man success in his career, in his chosen enterprise, is justification. If he has no career and no ideas at all he deceives himself, and makes himself hot and happy playing games.

He does not trouble to think--it is not his business to think whether what he is doing serves the race or not. He wants to do something, and do it better than other people, and have his friends congratulate him and his womenfolk make a fuss about it. No--Mary pulled herself up--no, that was unjust, she was letting herself lose touch with her real thought! A man likes success, who doesn't?--and he likes a little petting, particularly if one allows him to pretend that he despises it. But in the end it is not petting that sways him. He has a need to impress himself on the world that he finds outside him, an impulse that drives him to achieve his ends recklessly, ruthlessly, through any depth of suffering and conflict. She must be very just, she told herself, she must be serious, and not assume that little air of half-amused toleration with which middle-aged women are apt to dismiss the turbulence of men. She had often assumed it, in order perhaps, she thought now, to save her temper, but this was not an occasion for its use. For it is just by means of the qualities that are often so irritating, their tiresome restlessness, their curiosity, their disregard for security, for seemliness, even for life itself, that men have mastered the world and filled it with the wealth of civilisation. It is after this foolish, disorganised fashion of theirs, each of them--difficult, touchy creatures--busy with his personal ambitions, that they have armed the race with science, dignified it with art--one can take men lightly, she told herself solemnly, to protect oneself from annoyance, but one cannot take lightly the things that men have done.

Women, however--this was the thought that had stirred her to begin her thinking--women are not divided by all these different aims. Their single end, poor hampered things, is the service and the care of human beings. Amid the magnificent confusion of man's conquests, in a world whose riches and beauties man has turned to plunder, they do what they can to love people, to feed them, to keep them healthy and happy.

It was exactly plunder that she meant--she told herself after a minute's consideration--for what are women, after all, but mere camp-followers, dragged up and down the world, allowed to exist and to carry out their work in the interstices of man's enterprises, even permitted to enrich themselves, if they can, by stealing a little here and there from the vast accumulations of his loot, but without power to influence the campaign, to choose the enemy, to choose the issue, even to decide the order of the day's journey? It is no wonder, poor things, she thought, forgiving them in advance, that with their children to rear and their men to humour they have not been able to heal the wounds of these preposterous battles, that in a land littered up with bricks, with iron, with food, with stuffs, with books, with pictures, with tools and machinery, with all the wealth that men--brilliant acquisitive creatures--so love to produce, most of the people who live among these riches are denied an access to knowledge and lack the simple necessities of health. It is no wonder, but the point that she wanted--she made very sure of it--is that this business that has not been done, this task of distributing and administering, is not men's but women's work. Men care for things, for their splendid complicated expensive things, women care for the happiness that can be got from them. There are women, of course, who don't, women like magpies, who have absorbed men's ideals without doing the work that makes them honourable--she made the concession hastily, for it suddenly occurred to her that hers would hardly be a man's view of women--but after all one can put such people aside. In her own life Mary had always put them aside, regarding them as the affair of men and not of decent women. They were spoiled, poor things, and doubtless not mainly by their own fault. There are men who prey on the world, one can match the two sets of them against one another. To protect the poor and the helpless is women's work, and if they neglect the task there seems no reason--the London Library had not been reassuring--to suppose that it will ever be properly done.

She turned back to her concrete example. James, for instance, had conceived his business and brought it into being like a man. It was not his fault that he had to build it according to the conditions of modern commerce. It was not his fault that he had not a natural tenderness for the girls' weak lungs, their flat feet, for the varicose veins in their legs. A man like James was impatient of weakness and stupidity,--impatient, therefore, of poverty and helplessness. His workers were his material--his instruments--his troops; all men's games have, after all, she supposed, an analogy to their great game of war. Men enjoy a fight, they had rather get things by fighting, and when one fights someone is sure to be hurt. No, these poor girls in the restaurants were not James's charge, but hers, and she had neglected her charge as idle women neglect it everywhere.

Mary reached this point in her thoughts with a certain satisfaction. The matter was now quite settled in her mind. She did not so much believe the conclusions she had come to as feel that this was her way of looking at things. Others might look at them in a different way, but for her, henceforth, that part of government that consists in helping the weak and protecting them from the strong was to seem part of woman's general task of clearing up after men. She understood now why James had not been pleased when she tried to undertake her neglected duty. Man never is pleased by the sight of woman's work. He hates having his study tidied, he hates meeting the housemaid on the stairs, the primitive routine of infant life makes no appeal to him. He does not like to think that his wife could possibly clean a rabbit. It is not logical of him, but there it is--in future she would not expect from James any glow of enthusiasm over the details of her work, she would be content with his general pat of appreciation when he found it properly done. Many a woman has been content with less.

Nor was she dismayed, as well she might have been, by the inadequacy of which she convicted her sex. We are all inadequate, and what she needed was a reason for being inadequate no longer. She had found it, she was delivered now, once and for all, from her doubt and her cowardice, from her ridiculous dilemma of a virtuous person helpless in an evil world. She had been, in her passive way, as evil as the world. She found the reflection bracing.

It was not until the next afternoon, when she was taking her walk by the river, that she began to wonder why she had been wicked and what were her excuses. It was a sunny day, the people on the Embankment walked cheerfully and the seagulls seemed to be enjoying themselves as they screamed over her head. The cold bright air made her thoughts--she imagined--unnaturally clear. She herself, of course, had been trustful and ignorant, so had her mother been, her grandmother, and in her grandmother's generation all really nice women. But women had not always been ignorant--in the days when they gnawed bones and lived in caves they must have possessed at least a rough practical knowledge of everyday life. In the Middle Ages, too--that was the next period of English history that came at all easily to her mind--James, a good burgher, or perhaps a farmer, would have expected her to look after his workers, after the maids, in any case, and the apprentices. She would, she thought a little wistfully, have liked doing that! It would have pleased her to plan and arrange for the big household, and have all these girls and boys growing up round her and all their careers and love affairs to watch over. And she would have liked to be a skilful woman with half a dozen crafts at her finger-ends, a woman with legitimate prides, with a reputation for this or that,--spinning, weaving, preserving, baking,--all the things that James and his friends were doing in factories. Even if her children had left her there would have been her trades to carry on. And it would, too, she told herself, have been very much more amusing for the children to grow up in such a community than in an elegant and empty modern home. There were now no interesting domestic crafts to watch, no apprentices to play with, no population of maids or clerks or journeymen to distract the eye of the mistress of the house. Instead, a strip of one side of a straight street, servants one hardly spoke to tucked away in the dark, and dear mother in the drawing-room never too busy to realise that the children were not where they ought to be and were making too much noise. Of course that was an advantage--Mary's loyalty stirred--a busy mother cannot devote herself all day to her children. But memory was too strong for loyalty--a busy mother has at least a certain intelligence at her disposed. Mary's own dear mother had not been intelligent.

She left that part of the subject hastily--she did not wish to think ill of her mother but she certainly had not succeeded with poor Julius. Mary was fond of Julius, but nobody could admire his character.

She turned her thoughts, rather, to the reasons for this change. Men, of course, had wanted to make fortunes out of women's industries, and with their usual success they had invented machines that would do it. And women, protesting probably, and being called fools for their pains, had let them go. The workers had gone into the factories and it was not a time when ladies could follow them there. Ladies, after all, were people of no education, and the idea of their responsibility had not occurred to them. Then, of course, there had been Napoleon. Mary had always disliked Napoleon and she was pleased to attribute this extra blame to him. He was a person, as she saw him, who had butchered the sons of a million mothers without in any way making it up to women as a husband or as the father of wonderful children. This Napoleon had looked upon women in the way a man of his nature would--as trifles and possessions, and the English nation had hastened to copy him. Only being Englishmen they had grown sentimental and called their wives angels and shut them in drawing-rooms. From their point of view, one must admit, it was a pleasant arrangement. A woman with nothing to do all day would naturally be ingratiating and affectionate in the evenings. And then of course there had been the French Revolution--it was with both delight and surprise that Mary recalled these historical facts. A year ago, she felt, her thoughts would hardly have moved with such an easy boldness. The French Revolution--ideas of equality were in the air--only in this country we do not level down but up. The middle classes must have enjoyed seeing their wives lead the life of a fine lady without, of course--Mary thought of Lady Hester's mamma--a fine lady's idea of herself or her challenging eye. It was all very natural. And then there had been the Queen and her babies and her crinolines--one could not expect women to be energetic with such a weight of cloth dragging at their waists. So they had gone on indulging their husbands and making them bad-tempered until by and by their children had revolted, and now--she felt a little thrill of excitement--she was revolting too!

Well--she put it to herself--it was perfectly right and proper! They had had a hundred years of drawing-rooms. And in spite of photographs and Nottingham lace and new kinds of light and new-coloured dyes and stuffs the rooms of a hundred years ago were probably prettier. It was no wonder that they were tired of staying in them. She, at any rate, was tired of hers. She was not a fine lady, she did not care for a fine lady's life. She was an ordinary middle-class woman, who preferred doing practical work to being kept in the house to be beautiful and mysterious and tender and all the rest of it to any man with half an hour to spare.

She had reached the Vauxhall Bridge Road now, and she turned back. She was surprised at the resentment that she discovered in herself when she thought of this aspect of the life she had led. She and her personality had simply been there to soothe them when they preferred her, as a comforter, to their pipes! She knew that she had not seen the matter like this before, and yet this was not, she felt convinced, a new resentment. She must have disliked her position all along, if only she had known it.

Well, there was no need to resent anything now, she was not poor Miss Percival, she had finished with the cause of her anger. In future she would have a life of her own, work of her own, and importance greater than the importance of her smiles or of her sympathy. It would not be, as a matter of fact, a question of smiles! For the first step towards her new activity would be telling James about what she meant to do.

This thought made her walk a little faster, but walking faster did not make the thought more pleasant. She would have to face an appalling scene with James, and probably a great many scenes after that. He would not give up his own way without a struggle. A fortnight ago, when she still hated James, she would not very much have minded his scenes, but now she had forgiven him, she had let herself feel fond of him again, she had deliberately stirred up her gratitude! She almost wished that she could take cover, just for the first impending interview, behind the dislike that had protected her when she ran away. But she could not do that--even on general grounds it is not right to dislike people if in any way one can manage to make oneself like them. And she owed it to James, moreover, to approach him in the kindest mood compatible with firmness. She had caused him, by her behaviour, quite enough discomfort and chagrin already. For the same reason she must not keep him waiting. She must write to him as soon as she got home and tell him that she meant to come back again.

She walked home without enjoying either the river or the sun.