Lady Isabel, no less uneasy under it than was Alex herself, broke in with nervous exasperation in her every intonation:
"Oh, Francis, it is the same old story—one of those foolish infatuations. You know what she has always been like, and how worried I was about that dreadful Torrance girl. It's this nun now, I suppose."
"Who is this woman?"
"How should I know?" helplessly said Lady Isabel. "Alex?"
"The Superior—the Head of the house." Alex stopped. How could one say, "Mother Gertrude of the Holy Cross?" She did not even know what the Superior's name in the world had been, or where she came from.
"Go on," said Sir Francis inexorably.
They were all looking at her, and sheer desperation came to her help.
"Why shouldn't I have friends?... What is all this about?" Alex asked wildly. "It's my own life. I don't want to be undutiful, but why can't I live my own life? Everything I ever do is wrong, and I know you and father are disappointed in me, but I don't know how to be different—I wish I did." She was crying bitterly now. "You wanted me to marry Noel, and I would have if I could, but I knew that it would all have been wrong, and we should have made each other miserable. Only when I did break it off, it all seemed wrong and heartless, and I don't know what to do—" She felt herself becoming incoherent, and the tension of the atmosphere grew almost unbearable.
Sir Francis Clare spoke, true to the traditions of his day, viewing with something very much like horror the breaking down of those defences of a conventional reserve that should lay bare the undisciplined emotions of the soul.
"You have said enough, Alex. There are certain things that we do not put into words.... You are unhappy, my child, you have said so yourself, and it has been sufficiently obvious for some time."