thought of the magnanimity in such abasement; she dropped from this
fragile foothold to burning resentment, and, seeing where resentment
must lead her, she turned again and clasped, with tight-closed eyes, the
love that, looked upon, could not be held without humiliation.
Self-doubt and self-analysis had brought her to this state of pitiful
chaos. The only self left seemed centred in her love; if she did not
give up Gerald, what was left her but accepted abasement? If she let him
go, it would be to own to herself that she had failed to hold him, to
see herself as a nonentity. Yet, to go on clinging, what would that
show? Only with closed eyes could she cling. To open them for the merest
glimmer was to see that she was, indeed, nothing, if she had not
strength to relinquish a man who did not any longer, in any sense, wish
to make her his wife. With closed eyes one might imagine that it was
strength that clung; with open eyes one saw that it was weakness.

Miss Harriet Robinson, all alert gaiety and appreciation, had arrived at
Merriston on Saturday, had talked all through Sunday, and had come up
to London with Althea and Gerald on Monday morning. Gerald had gone to a
smoking-carriage, and Althea had hardly exchanged a word with him. She
and Miss Robinson went to a little hotel in Mayfair, a hotel supposed to
atone for its costliness and shabbiness by some peculiar emanation of
British comfort. Americans of an earnest, if luxurious type, congregated
there and found a satisfactory local flavour in worn chintzes and uneven
passages. Lady Blair had kindly pressed Althea to stay with her in South
Kensington and be married from her house; but even a week ago, when this
plan had been suggested, Althea had shrunk from it. It had seemed, even
then, too decisive. Once beneath Lady Blair's quasi-maternal roof one
would be propelled, like a labelled parcel, resistlessly to the altar.
Even then Althea had felt that the little hotel in Mayfair, with its
transient guests and impersonal atmosphere, offered further breathing
space for indefiniteness.

She was thankful indeed for breathing space as, on the afternoon of her
arrival, she sat sunken in a large chair and felt, as one relief, that
she would not see Miss Robinson again until evening. It had been
tormenting, all the journey up, to tear herself from her own sick
thoughts and to answer Miss Robinson's unsuspecting comments and
suggestions.

Miss Robinson was as complacent and