She dropped her voice here and came very close to him.
"Do you know what it is to hate and love the same person? I was like that with father. When he had drunk too much and broke all the things—when we had so few anyway—and hit the boys, and did things—oh, dreadful things that men do when they're drunk, then I hated him. I didn't love him. I didn't want to help him—I just wanted to get away. And before—before he drank so much he was so good and so sweet and so clever. Do you know that my father was one of the cleverest doctors in the whole of England? He was. If he hadn't drunk he might have been anywhere and done anything. But sometimes when he was drunk and the boys were away at school, and the house was in such a mess, and the servant wouldn't stay because of father, I felt I couldn't go on—I couldn't!—and that I'd run down the road leaving everything as it was, into the town and hide so that they'd never find me. . . . And now," she suddenly broke out, "I have run away—and see what I've made of it!"
"It isn't over yet," he said to her quietly. "Life's just beginning for you."
"Well, anyway," she answered, with a sudden resolute calm that made her seem ever so much older and more mature, "I've helped the boys to start in life, and I won't have to go back to all that again—that's something. It's fine to love some one and work for them as you said just now, but if it's always dirty, and there's never enough money, and the servants are always in a bad temper, and you never have enough clothes, and all the people in the village laugh at you because your father drinks, then you want to stop loving for a little while and to escape anywhere, anywhere to anybody where it isn't dirty. Love isn't enough—no, it isn't—if you're so tired with work that you haven't any energy to think whether you love or not."
She hesitated there, looking away from him, and said so softly that he with difficulty caught her words: "I will tell you one thing that you won't believe, but it's true. I wanted to go to Crispin."
He turned to look at her in amazement.
"You wanted to go?"
"Yes. I know you thought that I went for the boys and father. I know that David thinks that too. Of course that was true a little. He promised me that they should have everything. It was a relief to me that I needn't think of them any more. But it wasn't only that. I wanted to go. I wanted to be free."
"To be free!" Harkness cried. "My God! What freedom! I can understand your wanting to escape, but with such men. . . ."
She turned round upon him eagerly. "You don't know what he can be like—the elder Crispin, I mean. And to a girl, an ignorant, conceited girl. Yes, I was conceited, that was the cause of everything. Father had all sorts of books in his room, I used to read everything I could see—French and German in a kind of way, and secretly I was very proud of myself. I thought that I was more learned than any one I knew, and I used to smile to myself secretly when I overheard people saying how good I was to the boys, and how unselfish, and I would think, 'That's not what I am at all. If you only knew how much I know, and the kind of things, you'd be surprised.'