better yet, knowing these truths without having to discover them. She
was but one of a gathering company, men as well as women, old
with young....

Hugo had stood rock-like across the way she was moving. And so Hugo had
lost her.

But these things seemed hardly to matter now; it all went down so much
deeper. Surely it was over something bigger than her "little views" that
her story-book prince had locked arms with the lame slum doctor,
curiously recognized by him as an adversary at sight.

They had entered her life in almost the same hour, two men so different
that she had come at last to see them as full opposites. So entering
together, they had both become involved with her in the first moral
problem of her life, which also began in that hour. And upon that
problem each had been called, in turn, to ring his mettle. One, the fine
flower of her own world, with a high respect for that world's opinions
and on the whole a low esteem of the worth of a woman, had found her
completely satisfying as she was. The other, a wanderer from some other
planet, with his strange indifference to the world's values and his
extraordinary hope of everything human, had been so passionately
dissatisfied with her that he, a kind man surely, had broken out in
speech that had left a scar upon her memory. And upon the stranger's
shocking appraisement of her, there had, indeed, hung a tale.

There were times when it had seemed that everything she had done
afterwards had been but stages of an effort, months prolonged, to shake
herself free from that compassionate _God pity you_....

But no; she knew it was not that way exactly. Before that night she had
felt vague reachings and had put them down; and similarly afterwards.
Buttressed about with her island's social security, strong in her
woman's faculty for believing what she needed to believe, she could
easily persuade herself, or almost, that there had been only an
unfortunate misunderstanding about Jack Dalhousie, that she personally
hadn't done anything at all. She remembered that she had all but put the
matter where it would trouble her no more. And then there had come a
night when she saw that the stranger, by a certain gentleness and trust
there were in him, had not been able to believe his own hard words of
her. This man believed that she was good; believed it because he himself
was good. And the moment of that revelation had been terrible to her.
She had felt in Hen's parlor the smart