She began to doubt, to read the verses of Arthur Symons, and to think that only by suffering could she find herself. Even the breaking-off of her engagement, however, failed immediately to terminate the quest successfully.
"I have tried not to be bitter," was the keynote of Edna's twenties.
By the time she had reached the stage of quoting:
"How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows in your changing face——"
—lines which the majority of women read with such a singular sense of applicability to their own needs—Edna had met Sir Julian Rossiter.
She was a great deal more beautiful at nine-and-twenty than at nineteen, and she had, moreover, learnt to smile. Tragedy, in which she really excelled, had proved strangely unprovocative of interest in anyone but herself, and she had therefore been obliged to cultivate the large, grave serenity that forgets itself in the thought of others.
It was not this, however, which had caused Sir Julian to ask her to marry him.