But knowing that this suggestion was in the air, I was the better able to interpret Mildred's oracular utterance the next time I sat at the foot of the couch, in the darkened room.
"One can't be true to another," she said, in reply to some feeler of my own, "unless one is true to oneself, and one can't be true to oneself unless one follows the highest of one's instincts."
I said, inwardly: "Ah! Now I know the reason for her distrust of me." Aloud I made it:
"But that throws us back on the question as to what one's highest instincts are."
There was the pause that preceded all her expressions of opinion.
"On the principle that it is more blessed to give than to receive, I suppose our highest promptings are those which urge us to give most of ourselves."
"And when one gives all of oneself that one can dispose of?"
"One has then to consider the importance or the unimportance of what one has to withhold."
Of all the things that had been said to me this was the most disturbing. It had seemed to me hitherto that the essence of my duty lay in marrying Hugh. If I married him, I argued, I should have done my best to make up to him for all he had undergone for my sake. I saw myself as owing him a debt. The refusal to pay it would have implied a kind of moral bankruptcy. Considering myself solvent, and also considering myself honest, I felt I had no choice. Since I could pay, I must pay. The reasoning was the more forcible because I liked Hugh and was grateful to him. I could be tolerably happy with him, and would make him a good wife.
To make him a good wife I had choked back everything I had ever felt for Larry Strangways; I had submitted to all the Brokenshire repressions; I had made myself humble and small before Hugh and his father, and accepted the status of a Libby Jaynes. My heart cried out like any other woman's heart—it cried out for my country in the hour of its stress; it cried out for my home in what I tried to make the hour of my happiness; when it caught me unawares it cried out for the man I loved. But all this I mastered as our Canadian men were mastering their longings and regrets on saying their good-bys. What was to be done was to be done, and done willingly. Willingly I meant to marry Hugh, not because he was the man I would have chosen before all others, but because, when no one else in the world was giving me a thought, he had had the astonishing goodness to choose me. And now—