t only because, obeying the dictates of
her nature; she could do nothing else.

Nevertheless, it occasioned her some surprise, whenever she had time to
think of it, to note the speed with which she had adapted herself to the
facts. Once revealed, she seemed to have always known them--to have
shared that first embarrassment for ready money that had induced her
father to borrow from funds so temptingly under his control, and to have
gone on with him, step by step, through the subsequent years of struggle
and disaster. They were years over which the sun was already darkened
and the moon turned into blood, so that, looking back on them, it was
almost impossible to recapture the memory of the light-heartedness with
which she had lived through them. It was incredible to her now that they
had been years of traveling and visiting and dancing and hunting and
motoring and yachting, of following fashion and seeking pleasure in
whatever might have been the vogue of the minute. Some other self, some
pale, secondary, astral self, must have crossed and recrossed the
Atlantic and been a guest in great houses and become a favorite in
London, Paris, Biarritz, Florida, Scotland, Rome! Some other self must
have been sought out for her society, admired for her style, and
privileged to refuse eligible suitors! Some other self must have met
Rupert Ashley in the little house at Southsea and promised to become his
wife! From the standpoint of the present it seemed to her as if an
unreal life had ended in an unreal romance that was bringing to her,
within a day or two, an unreal hero. She was forced again face to face
with that fact that the man who was coming to marry her was, for all
practical knowledge that she had of him, a stranger. In proportion as
calamity encompassed her he receded, taking his place once more in that
dim world she should never have frequented and in which she had no
longer lot nor part.

She should never have frequented it for the simple reason that for all
she had brought to it or got from it some one else had to pay. The
knowledge induced a sense of shame which no consciousness of committed
crime could have exceeded. She would have been less humiliated had she
plotted and schemed to win flattery and homage for herself than she was
in discovering that people had been tricked into giving them
spontaneously. To drop the mask, to tear asunder the robe of pretense,
to cry the truth from the housetops, and, like some Script