Strange enough it seemed now; but till the other day Hugo and Dr. Vivian had hardly once met in the thoughts of Cally Heth. They had hardly met in life, never exchanged a word since the night in the summer-house: so she, untrained to discernment, had supposed that they had nothing to do with each other. Now, in the last few days, it had come to seem that these two had, in her, been pitted against each other from the beginning.
Forces not of her making had cut and patterned her life; and she, driven on by feelings which she herself had hardly understood, had crumpled up that pattern and seized the shears of destiny in her own hand. The groove she had been set and clamped so fast into ran straight as a string into Hugo Canning's arms; but she had broken out of her groove, and Hugo was gone, to cross her path no more. And her mother thought, and Hugo had said almost with his parting breath, that she had been driven to these madnesses by mere foolish femininisms, new little ideas picked up from Cooneys or elsewhere.
It was true that she had these ideas; true, too, that she was not alone with them. She had been drilled from birth to the ranks of the beguilers of men, their sirens but their inferiors; and something in her, even before this year, had rebelled at that rating of herself, dimly perceiving--as she had heard a man say once--that marriage was better regarded as a career than as a means of livelihood. She had been drilled again to believe that her happiness depended on money in quantities, things had; but then, at the first pinch of real trouble, these things had seemed to sag beneath her, and she perceived dimly, once more, that she had built her house upon something like sand. And if her particular experiences here had been unique, she had seen that her experience was, after all, a common one. As if with eyes half-opened, she had divined all about her other people making the discoveries she had made; or, better yet, knowing these truths without having to discover them. She was but one of a gathering company, men as well as women, old with young....
Hugo had stood rock-like across the way she was moving. And so Hugo had lost her.
But these things seemed hardly to matter now; it all went down so much deeper. Surely it was over something bigger than her "little views" that her story-book prince had locked arms with the lame slum doctor, curiously recognized by him as an adversary at sight.
They had entered her life in almost the same hour, two men so different that she had come at last to see them as full opposites. So entering together, they had both become involved with her in the first moral problem of her life, which also began in that hour. And upon that problem each had been called, in turn, to ring his mettle. One, the fine flower of her own world, with a high respect for that world's opinions and on the whole a low esteem of the worth of a woman, had found her completely satisfying as she was. The other, a wanderer from some other planet, with his strange indifference to the world's values and his extraordinary hope of everything human, had been so passionately dissatisfied with her that he, a kind man surely, had broken out in speech that had left a scar upon her memory. And upon the stranger's shocking appraisement of her, there had, indeed, hung a tale.
There were times when it had seemed that everything she had done afterwards had been but stages of an effort, months prolonged, to shake herself free from that compassionate God pity you....
But no; she knew it was not that way exactly. Before that night she had felt vague reachings and had put them down; and similarly afterwards. Buttressed about with her island's social security, strong in her woman's faculty for believing what she needed to believe, she could easily persuade herself, or almost, that there had been only an unfortunate misunderstanding about Jack Dalhousie, that she personally hadn't done anything at all. She remembered that she had all but put the matter where it would trouble her no more. And then there had come a night when she saw that the stranger, by a certain gentleness and trust there were in him, had not been able to believe his own hard words of her. This man believed that she was good; believed it because he himself was good. And the moment of that revelation had been terrible to her. She had felt in Hen's parlor the smart of coals of fire, the strange, new shame of being trusted, but untrustworthy. So there had entered her a guilty disquiet: and afterwards, however she had struggled, however Hugo's protecting strength had compassed her about, that novel sense had kept growing through the months, steadily gathering momentum....
All this was quite clear to her now. Nothing had made her tell the truth about Jack Dalhousie except that one man had expected her to. Of all that had happened to her, here was the beating heart.