pty social
functions. Everything she had now was real--love, and nature, riding,
music, animals, and poor people. What else was worth having? She would
not have changed for anything. It often seemed to her that books and
plays about the unhappiness of women in her position were all false. If
one loved, what could one want better? Such women, if unhappy, could
have no pride; or else could not really love! She had recently been
reading "Anna Karenina," and had often said to herself: "There's
something not true about it--as if Tolstoy wanted to make us believe that
Anna was secretly feeling remorse. If one loves, one doesn't feel
remorse. Even if my baby had been taken away, I shouldn't have felt
remorse. One gives oneself to love--or one does not."

She even derived a positive joy from the feeling that her love imposed a
sort of isolation; she liked to be apart--for him. Besides, by her very
birth she was outside the fold of society, her love beyond the love of
those within it--just as her father's love had been. And her pride was
greater than theirs, too. How could women mope and moan because they
were cast out, and try to scratch their way back where they were not
welcome? How could any woman do that? Sometimes, she wondered whether,
if Fiorsen died, she would marry her lover. What difference would it
make? She could not love him more. It would only make him feel,
perhaps, too sure of her, make it all a matter of course. For herself,
she would rather go on as she was. But for him, she was not certain, of
late had been less and less certain. He was not bound now, could leave
her when he tired! And yet--did he perhaps feel himself more bound than
if they were married--unfairly bound? It was this thought--barely more
than the shadow of a thought--which had given her, of late, the extra
gravity noticed by her father.

In that unlighted room with the moonbeams drifting in, she sat down at
Summerhay's bureau, where he often worked too late at his cases,
depriving her of himself. She sat there resting her elbows on the bare
wood, crossing her finger-tips, gazing out into the moonlight, her mind
drifting on a stream of memories that seemed to have beginning only from
the year when he came into her life. A smile crept out on her face, and
now and then she uttered a little sigh of contentment.

So many memories, nearly all happy! Surely, the most adroit work of the
jeweller who put the human soul togethe