"Well," she went on at last, still speaking earnestly, if fumblingly, "I'm not sure I can express at all what I feel. It's what I've been coming to feel more and more—no doubt a gradual development up out of the cocksure attitude of one's—Barrett, I've begun using a dreadful and ruthless word—one's immaturity ...!" She tossed her head. "It doesn't mean I don't still believe in all the fine, big movements. You know"—her voice for a moment grew almost tender—"I always looked upon myself as one of the first of the 'new' women. I wasn't going at things blindly. I was always following an ideal, Barrett, even when the things I did seemed most wild and inexplicable. But as I look back I seem to have been following strange roads in an effort to reach it! How strange! And now—yes, only fancy, as you say: in one's old age!—I'm afraid I see in a way that 'progress' can be overdone. That is, I've come to see that progress is something you can't force. Yet there have to be pioneers in the world, don't there, Barrett? People who are reckless, and pay the price, and aren't afraid of going too far.... Yes, I realize that, as I've always realized it. But oh, Barrett, Barrett—I'm afraid I'm getting to be very, very selfish. I've been a pioneer so long, and after all I don't quite want to be a pioneer to the very end of my days. I—I somehow feel I want to stop being one before—oh, Barrett, before it's quite too late ...!"
"I think," said O'Donnell slowly, his voice just a little shaken, "if the time has come for plain speaking like this, you'd better let me hold your hand. Do you mind?"
"Listen to him!" she said, in one of her richest tones of banter.
All the same, she let him have it.
While these important events were proceeding, Louise, who had not gone to find Mr. Barry, after all, but who had returned to her room instead, slept a little. She was unused to such early rising, and she had been through a great deal since dawn.
She slept, and had a dream. She dreamed that she and Leslie were to be married. She seemed to be very much excited, and to be surrounded by a crowd of indefinite persons, some of them friends she now possessed, and some of them friends she had known in her early girlhood. And all the while she was happily arguing: "I know I'm a little bit older, but we love each other so much that just a mere couple of years don't count."
Waking with a start to problems more sinister than merely that involving a conventional disagreement of ages, Louise perceived that it had drawn to the golden midst of afternoon. Lynndal was waiting for her. As the curious, almost hypnotic quality of the dream wore off, she responded to another flash of new purpose. The dream still haunted and oppressed her; at first it had made her sad; but as it faded into a renewed appreciation of that humiliating conversation beside the driftwood shed, a mood of rebellion came upon her.
She tossed her head haughtily: Leslie should be allowed to make no further difference to her. She would thrust him entirely out of her life. He ought never really to have entered it. No, she shouldn't have given herself to Leslie, even temporarily. It had produced an unpleasant situation, and afforded him an opportunity now to fling all her kindness back in her face. He had, indeed, treated her shamefully—not at all as he had treated her earlier in the day. At dawn.... But she murmured angrily: "This is the return one gets for trying to be nice to a man!"
The new mood inclined her, in a subtle way, toward Lynndal—as abruptly as it had hardened her heart against Leslie. The emotion of the moment illuminated the former in an almost rosy manner. She began thinking of Lynndal warmly and romantically—as she had thought of him during those long months when they were far apart. Her attitude again became the attitude she had maintained throughout the period of their increasingly affectionate correspondence. And the sense of his nearness seemed no longer to distract or terrify her. Excitement stirred in her breast. It leapt to her eyes and trembled upon her lips. She had never loved Lynndal so almost tempestuously. Strong emotion of this sort always had a beautifying effect upon Miss Needham. Her face glowed as she encouraged the rekindling passion. She fanned the flame of her love for Lynndal, and at the same time a soft sense of steadfastness and assurance snuffed out the dismal quandary which had wracked and tortured her soul from the moment she saw him up on the deck of the steamer. Some mad whim, she argued feverishly, had filled her with a panic of indecision and dread; but that was gone now. She whipped the purging passion into new and fantastic fervour. Her laugh had a touch of wildness in it. Even Richard had never moved her like this!