herself, she was soon aware that a few people on board had identified
her and communicated their knowledge to others. On the whole, she felt
herself treated with deference. Her own version of her story was clearly
accepted, at least by the majority; some showed her an unspoken but
evident sympathy, while her wealth made her generally interesting. Yet
there were two or three in whom she felt or fancied a more critical
attitude; who looked at her coolly, and seemed to avoid her. Bostonian
Pharisees, no doubt!--ignorant of all those great expansions of the
female destiny that were going forward.

The fact was--she admitted it--that she was abnormally sensitive. These
moral judgments, of different sorts, of which she was conscious,
floating as it were in the life around her, which her mind isolated and
magnified, found her smarting and sore, and would not let her be. Her
irritable pride was touched at every turn; she hardly knew why. She was
not to be judged by anybody; she was her own defender and her own judge.
If she was no longer a symbolic and sympathetic figure--like that young
mother among her children--she had her own claims. In the secrecy of the
mind she fiercely set them out.

The days passed, however, and as she neared the English shores her
resistance to a pursuing thought became fainter. It was, of course,
Boyson's astonishing appeal to her that had let loose the Avenging
Goddesses. She repelled them with scorn; yet all the same they hurtled
round her. After all, she was no monster. She had done a monstrous thing
in a sudden brutality of egotism; and a certain crude state of law and
opinion had helped her to do it, had confused the moral values and
falsified her conscience. But she was not yet brutalized. Moreover, do
what she would, she was still in a world governed by law; a world at the
heart of which broods a power austere and immutable; a power which man
did not make, which, if he clash with it, grinds him to powder. Its
manifestations in Daphne's case were slight, but enough. She was not
happy, that certainly was clear. She did not suppose she ever would be
happy again. Whatever it was--just, heroic, or the reverse--the action
by which she had violently changed her life had not been a success,
estimated by results. No other man had attracted her since she had cast
Roger off; her youth seemed to be deserting her; she saw herself in the
glass every morning with discontent, even a kind of terror; she had lo