d, though the triumph continued to subsist, the shame
subsisted also, so that the two jostled one another striving for the
mastery. Damaris took her hands from her face, again clasped them about
her drawn-up knees, and sat, looking straight in front of her with
sombre, meditative eyes. To use a phrase of her childhood, she was busy
with her "thinkings"; her will consciously hailing emotion to the
judgment-seat of intelligence for examination and for sentence.

If this was what people commonly understand when they speak of love, if
this was the love concerning which novelists write and poets sing--this
riot of the blood and heady rapture, this conflict of shame and triumph
in which the animal part of one has so loud a word to say--she didn't
like it. It was upsetting, to the confines of what she supposed
drunkenness must be. It spoilt things heretofore exquisite, by giving
them too high a colour, too violent a flavour. No--she didn't like it.
Neither did she like herself in relation to it--like this unknown,
storm-swept Damaris. Nor--for he, alas! couldn't escape inclusion--this
new, unfamiliar presentment of the man with the blue eyes. Yet--and here
was a puzzle difficult of solution--even while this new presentment of
him, and conception of his sentiment towards her, pulled him down from
his accustomed pedestal in her regard, it erected for him another
pedestal, more richly sculptured and of more costly material--since had
not his manifold achievements, the whole fine legend as well as the whole
physical perfection of him, manifested themselves to, and worked upon her
as never before?--Did this thing, love, then, as between man and woman,
spring from the power of beauty while soiling and lowering beauty--bestow
on it an hour of extravagant effulgence, of royal blossoming, only to
degrade it in the end?--The puzzle is old as humanity, old, one may say,
as sex. Little wonder if Damaris, sitting up in her maidenly bedchamber,
in the unsullied brightness of the early morning hour, failed to find any
satisfactory answer to it.

Her thoughts ranged out to the other members of her little local
court--to Peregrine Ditton and Harry Ellice, to Marshall Wace. Had they
personal experience of this disquieting matter? Was it conceivable the
boys' silly rivalries and jealousies concerning her took their rise in
this? Did it inspire the fervour of Marshall Wace's singing, his
flattering dependence on her sympathy?--Suspicion widened.