“I think you do,” said Florella, “whether you mean to or not. But you might have helped the best side of him to make amends for what he had done. You left him all to himself.”
“Well,” said Cosy, after a half-offended pause, “if I am a fool, at least I have the sense to know it.”
She threw herself into a chair by the fire, and sat staring into the blaze with her chin on her hands. She, brilliant, admired, successful, had done a small and a stupid thing, and her pride was stung by the knowledge. The sleeping soul began to stir within her. Life had been to her like the music described by hearsay—a sound without a tune. Her clever mind had dealt with words and signs, while the undeveloped and childish spirit had never realised their meaning. If Godfrey, as she had sometimes called him, had been “only a great boy,” poor Cosy herself was still but a great girl, and a selfish girl too, shrinking from the disturbance of passionate emotion.
In such a form she experienced the “conviction of sin,” and the change in her mental outlook was so great that it might well be called a conversion, as conversions come to such as she.
She got the thought of her own shortcoming quite clear in her mind, as clear as if it had been a mathematical problem, or the plot of a story. Then she got up, shook herself together, and went to get ready to recite at a “slum concert” patronised by some of her friends.
Part 3, Chapter III.
Saint Michael.
Godfrey’s brief glimpse of Constancy had sent his “forgetfulness” to the winds. He had written a very proper letter to Jeanie’s trustee uncle, telling him, in confidence, the exact state of the Ingleby affairs, owning that he had made advances which just now were difficult to follow up, but by which he should consider himself bound in future. And he further made it quite plain that he considered himself only master of Waynflete Hall de facto, and not de jure. The answer was also a very carefully considered composition, and was more encouraging than it probably would have been, if Guy’s health had been considered less precarious. A year was skilfully indicated as the time that it might take Godfrey to “see his way.” Of course there was to be no engagement; still, at the end of a year, if not before, they would like to hear how Mr Godfrey was getting on.