Lawrence was sleeping soundly. Very cautiously Rosaleen got up and barefooted made her way across the dusty floor of the studio to a chair near the window.
It was very early, not yet five o’clock; before her lay the Square, lonely and calm under a pallid sky across which filmy white clouds went flying. She could see, faintly, the strong white arch and beyond it the long, misty avenue, where the rows and rows of lights still gleamed. Her mind was working rapidly and futilely, spinning like a wheel in a void. She saw everything, observed everything, with remarkable vividness. She heard two men’s voices come suddenly out of the early morning quiet, talking loudly in Italian, they began abruptly, from nowhere, with a ringing sound of footsteps; they disappeared as abruptly and left the square as quiet as before.
Yes; of course! It was Nick Landry she wanted to think about, that dear boy with his quiet laugh that was balm to her soul after the sneers, the guffaws, the hysteric shrieks she was obliged to hear every day. Nick with his fastidious ways, his reserve so like her own, with his divine youth.... She recalled with a smile his lean, dark face, his quick frown, his voice, his gestures. She allowed herself to dwell upon him, to think of him with undisguised tenderness and pain, because it was her farewell to him. He was like herself. He would not come any more. He was like herself; they would not meet again; he felt as she did, about this, and about all other things. The difference between him and all these others with their Right to Love, their Right to Happiness, their Right to One’s Own Life! Both Nick and herself considered above all the Right of Other People to exist unmolested—Lawrence’s Rights, for instance....
Lawrence had shouted with laughter over those cheques from Nick. He had called him a sentimentalist. He said, and Ambrose Matthews said, and Enid said, and so many of the others said, that sentimentality was the curse of the world; that muddle-headed, unreasoning sentimentality was what ruined people’s lives. That the thing to be desired, the great panacea, was clear-sightedness, was enlightened self-interest. And yet Lawrence existed through her sentimentality and that of the good-humoured fellows who had lent their money. It was sentimentality which had caused Nick to help them, which now caused them to part....
Rosaleen observed that this fiercely scorned and detested sentimentality very often caused people to act with the greatest nobility. While common-sense and enlightened self-interest seemed frequently to bring forth incredible baseness.
She thought of things quite new to her; she saw life in a new, a larger way. She saw the desolate and bitter goal toward which her road led; and she was ready to set out on that road. It was the high moment of her life. It was the great triumph of her spirit, so horribly wounded, so valiant.
. . . . . . . . . .
She was startled by the harsh voice of Lawrence, and turning she saw him standing in the doorway of the back room, in his dressing gown.
“What the devil are you doing?” he asked. “Why did you get up at this time? It’s just struck five.”
“Nothing,” said Rosaleen. “Just—thinking. I couldn’t get to sleep again. I thought I’d like to sit by the window and get some air....”