I
Rachel now awaited her meeting with Breton with restless impatience. It should afford her, beyond everything, a solution. She was young enough and inexperienced enough to make many demands upon life—that it should be romantic, that it should, in the issues that it presented, be honest and open and clear, that it should allow her to settle her own place in it without any hurt to anyone else, that it should, in fact, arrange any number of compromises to suit herself and that it should nevertheless be so honest that it would admit of no compromises at all.
She approached life with all the reckless boldness of one who has never come into direct contact with it. Neither her relations with her grandmother nor with Roddy had as yet taken from her any of her youngest nor simplest illusions. Were life drab and uninteresting, why, then one turned simply to the place where it promised colour and adventure.
She had not yet discovered that when we go deliberately to grasp at happiness we are eternally eluded.
But in spite of her desire for honesty she refused to face the actual meeting with Breton. She knew him so slightly as Francis Breton and so intimately as an idea. What she felt in her heart was, that her grandmother had hoped to catch her by marrying her to Roddy and that nothing could prove so eloquently that she had not been caught as her friendship with Breton.
"I will show her and I will show Roddy that I am my own mistress, free whatever they may say or do."
Breton—seen dimly as a rebel against a harsh dominating world—was the figure of all romance and freedom. "Roddy doesn't care what happens to me. He'll do anything grandmother tells him to...."
She was now out to attack the Beaminster fortress; she did not as yet know that half of her was urgent for its defence.