“Mamma,”' she said, “is different. She thinks I'm wicked; you think I'm good. I don't know what I am—I don't understand myself at all; but I'm quite sure that I should do it again, if it had to be done.” Her eyes grew large with the certainty of her argument. She had a divine seriousness, a rapt look, as of one inspired from within. “I don't see how you can help it, if you see quite clearly that the person needs you. It seems disloyalty. It seems making too much of yourself—as if what happened to that part of you mattered! And it seems making too little of yourself, too—as if you shrank, as if you were afraid of vile people. One can't afford to be afraid—for the sake of such a small thing.”
Mr. Percival, nodding, patting her hand, put in a gentle remonstrance. “I shouldn't say that, Sancie, I shouldn't indeed. It used to be considered everything in the world, to a woman.”
She mused, then decided. “No. I can't understand that. It's not everything in the world. It's almost nothing compared to other things—like freedom. To me the only thing that seems to matter is one's mind. Freedom for that! You can give up anything else. But that you must have—if you are to live at all.”
He made a loyal effort to follow her thought, but it led him into dismal regions where he found himself unnerved. “I don't know, upon my soul, where you get these notions of yours, my dear. I don't indeed. Not from me, I believe.”
She smiled gently at him, but with a wistful tinge, as if she felt her isolation. “I don't know, either—but there they are. I always know what I've got to do. I see it, or feel it, ahead of me. There's a path that way, a path the other. I see the fork, and have to follow one of them. I always know which.”
That was equally beyond him. He left it, and returned to a more practical puzzlement. “But when—when you make up your mind about—him, you know? I wish you would tell me.”
“I'll tell you everything I can, dearest, of course.”
“Well, now, your freedom, you know. Your freedom of mind. Now, you gave him your freedom, didn't you! And your mind too? Didn't you, now?”
She had to consider that, and he watched her with anxiety. But she looked him fairly in the face with her answer, so that he read the truth in her eyes. “No,” she told him. “No. He never had that, luckily for me. I always knew what I had to do before he did. I could always see where he was right and I was wrong—or the other way about. I don't think I could ever give up my judgment. At least—” She had to think again; and again she answered him, but with heightened colour. “If I did—it would be a different sort of person altogether. Quite a different person.”
His face fell. This didn't sound like marriage-bells. “Oh, my dear!” he said ruefully. “You don't mean to tell me—”