character, but I have the capacity to
love unselfishly, and I am at heart as faithful and as good as any other
woman. But there is my birthright. I have had three years of sordid and
utterly miserable life, teaching squalid, dirty, unlovable children
things they had much better not know. I have lived here, here in Detton
Magna, among the smuts and the mists, where the flowers seem withered and
even the meadows are stony, where the people are hard and coarse as their
ugly houses, where virtue is ugly, and vice is ugly, and living is ugly,
and death is fearsome. And now you see what I have chosen--not in a
moment's folly, mind, because I am not foolish; not in a moment's
passion, either, because until now the only real feeling I have had in
life was for you. But I have chosen, and I hold to my choice."

"They won't let you stay here," he muttered.

"They needn't," she answered calmly. "There are other ways in which I can
at least earn as much as the miserable pittance doled out to me here. I
have avoided even considering them before. Shall I tell you why? Because
I didn't want to face the temptation they might bring with them. I always
knew what would happen if escape became hopeless. It's the ugliness I
can't stand--the ugliness of cheap food, cheap clothes, uncomfortable
furniture, coarse voices, coarse friends if I would have them. How do you
suppose I have lived here these last three years, a teacher in the
national schools? Look up and down this long, dreary street, at the names
above the shops, at the villas in which the tradespeople live, and ask
yourself where my friends were to come from? The clergyman, perhaps? He
is over seventy, a widower, and he never comes near the place. Why, I'd
have been content to have been patronized if there had been anyone here
to do it, who wore the right sort of clothes and said the right sort of
thing in the right tone. But the others--well, that's done with."

He remained curiously dumb. His eyes were fixed upon the fragments of the
photograph in the grate. In a corner of the room an old-fashioned clock
ticked wheezily. A lump of coal fell out on the hearth, which she
replaced mechanically with her foot. His silence seemed to irritate and
perplex her. She looked away from him, drew her chair a little closer
to the fire, and sat with her head resting upon her hands. Her tone had
become almost meditative.

"I knew that this would come one day," she went on. "Why don't you speak