same
tone as she had used in speaking of Hubert.

'I don't think she likes me. If she did, I should be able to be more
friendly with her. Her world is very different from ours.'

'Different? You mean you don't like Rodman?'

'I was not thinking of Mr. Rodman. I mean that her friends are not the
same as ours.'

Mutimer forgot for a moment his preoccupation in thought of Alice.

'Was there anything wrong with the people you met there?'

She was silent.

'Just tell me what you think. I want to know. What did you object to?'

'I don't think they were the best kind of people.'

'The best kind? I suppose they are what you call ladies and gentlemen?'

'You must have felt that they were not quite the same as the Westlakes,
for instance.'

'The Westlakes!'

He named them sneeringly, to Adela's astonishment. And he added as he
walked towards the door:

'There isn't much to be said for some of the people you meet there.'

A new complexity was introduced into her life. Viewed by this recent
light, Mutimer's behaviour since the return from London was not so
difficult to understand; but the problem of how to bear with it became
the harder. There were hours when Adela's soul was like a bird of the
woods cage-pent: it dashed itself against the bars of fate, and in
anguish conceived the most desperate attempts for freedom. She could
always die, but was it not hard to perish in her youth and with the
world's cup of bliss untasted? Flight? Ah! whither could she flee? The
thought of the misery she would leave behind her, the disgrace that
would fall upon her mother--this would alone make flight impossible. Yet
could she conceive life such as this prolonging itself into the hopeless
years, renunciation her strength and her reward, duty a grinning
skeleton at her bedside? It grew harder daily. More than a year ago she
thought that the worst was over, and since then had known the solace of
self-forgetful idealisms, of ascetic striving. It was all illusion,
the spinning of a desolate heart. There was no help now, for she knew
herself and the world. Foolish, foolish child, who with her own hand
had flung away the jewel of existence like a thing of no price! Her lot
appeared single in its haplessness. She thought of Stella, of Letty,
even of Alice; _they_ had not been doomed to learn in suffering. To her,
alone of all women, knowledge had come with a curse.

A month passed. Since Rodman's departure from Wanley, 'Arry Mutimer wa