en Clare reflected that of course neither of them had ever been in
such a situation before, and that, if they were not naturally eloquent,
it was not surprising that they should have expressed themselves in
short, jerky sentences. But that was only an excuse she made to herself
to account for the apparent unreality of it all. She turned her cheek to
a cool end of the pillow and tried to go to sleep.

She tried to bring back the white dreams she had dreamt when she had sat
alone in the shadow before the other two had come out to quarrel. She
did her best to bring back that vague, soft joy of yearning for
something beautiful and unknown. She tried to drop the silver veil of
fancy-threads woven by the May moon between her and the world. But it
would not come. Instead of it, she saw the flat platform, the man and
woman standing in the unnatural brightness, and the woman's desperate
little face when he had told her that she had never loved him. The dream
was not white any more.

So that was life. That was reality. That was the way men treated women.
She thought she began to understand what faithlessness and
unfaithfulness meant. She had seen an unfaithful man, and had heard him
telling the woman he had made love him that he never could love her any
more. That was real life.

Clare's heart went out to the little lady in white. By this time she was
alone in her cabin, and her pillow was wet with tears. Brook doubtless
was calmly asleep, unless he were drinking or doing some of those
vaguely wicked things which, in the imagination of very simple young
girls, fill up the hours of fast men, and help sometimes to make those
very men "interesting." But after what she had seen Clare felt that
Brook could never interest her under imaginable circumstances. He was
simply a "brute," as the lady in white had told him, and Clare wished
that some woman could make him suffer for his sins and expiate the
misdeeds which had made that little face so desperate and that short
laugh so bitter.

She wished, though she hardly knew it, that she had done anything rather
than have sat there in the shadow, all through the scene. She had lost
something that night which it would be hard indeed to find again. There
was a big jagged rent in the drop-curtain of illusions before her
life-stage, and through it she saw things that troubled her and would
not be forgotten.

She had no memory of her own of which the vivid brightness or the
intimate sadness