was no longer like the girl she always had been before. She
felt herself growing profoundly self-conscious, self-inquiring. She who
had hitherto been the merest creature of impulse--generous impulse,
surely, almost always--now found herself studying beforehand every word
she ought to speak and every act she ought to do. She lay awake of
nights cross-examining herself as to what precise words she had spoken
that day, as to what things she had done, what gestures even she had
made, in the vain and torturing effort to find out whether she had done
anything which might betray her secret. It seemed to her, with the
touching, delightful, pitiful egotism of which the love of the purest
heart is capable, that there was not a breathing of the common wind that
might not betray to the world the secret of her love. She had in former
days carried her disregard for the conventional so far that malign
critics, judging purely by the narrowest laws, had described her as
unwomanly. Nor were all these harsh and ill-judging critics women--which
would have been an intelligible thing enough. It is gratifying to
discourage vanity in woman, to set down as unwomanly the girl who has
gathered all the men around her. It is soothing to mortified feeling to
say that the successful girl simply 'went for' the men, and compelled
them to pay attention to her. But there were men not unfriendly to her
or to Sir Rupert who shook their heads and said that Helena Langley was
rather unwomanly. If they could have seen into her heart now, they would
have known that she was womanly enough in all conscience. She succumbed
in a moment to all the tenderest weaknesses and timidities of woman.
Never before had she cared one straw whether people said she was
flirting with this, that, or the other man--and the curious thing is
that, while she was thus utterly careless, people never did accuse her
of flirting. But now she felt in her own heart that she was conscious of
some emotion far more deep and serious than a wish for a flirtation; she
found that she was in love--in love--in love, and with a man who did not
seem to have the faintest thought of being in love with her. She felt,
therefore, as if she had to go through this part of her life masked, and
also armoured. Every eye that turned on her she regarded as a suspicious
eye. Every chance question addressed suddenly to her seemed like a
question driven at her, to get at the heart of her mystery. A man slowly
recoveri