d no place in the world
and yet eager too to defend himself, he left the room.

CHAPTER VII

THE OUTSIDE WORLD

Maggie had a week.

She did not need it. From the first half-hour after Martin's leaving
her her mind was made up. This question of marriage did not, on further
reflection, very greatly disturb her. She had known, in her time, a
number of married people and they had been invariably unhappy and
quarrelsome. The point seemed to be that you should be, in some way,
near the person whom you loved, and she had only loved one person in
all her life, and intended never to love another. Even this question of
love was not nearly so tangled for her as it would be for any more
civilised person. She knew very little about marriage and only in the
most sordid fashion about sexual relations which were definitely
connected in her mind with drunken peasants and her father's cook. They
had nothing at all to do with Martin.

The opinion of the world was an unknown factor in her vision, she only
knew of the opinion of her aunts and Miss Warlock and with these she
was already in rebellion.

She would have been in great trouble had she supposed that this woman
still loved Martin and needed him, but that, from what Martin had said,
was obviously not so. No, it was all quite clear. They would escape
together, out of this tangle of unnatural mysteries and warnings, and
live happily for ever after in the country.

As to Martin's self-portrait, that did not greatly distress her. She
had never supposed that he or any one else was "good." She had never
known a "good" person. Nor did it occur to her, in her pristine state
of savagery, that you loved any one the less for their drawbacks. She
would rather be with Martin at his worst than with any one else at
their best--that was all.

Half-an-hour was enough time to settle the whole affair. She then
waited patiently until the end of the week. She did not quite know how
she would arrange a meeting, but that would, she expected, arrange
itself.

Two events occurred that filled her mind and made the week pass
quickly. One was that she received an answer to her adventurous letter,
the other was a remarkable conversation with Miss Caroline Smith. The
answer to her letter was lying on her plate when she came down to
breakfast, and Aunt Elizabeth was watching it with an excited stare.

It read as follows:

14 BRYANSTON SQUARE.

Dear Miss CARDINAL,

Of course I remember yo