Did she read it once or twice or twenty times? or had she not read it at all? Was it all a dream, a miserable dream of shameful self-disgust and mortification? For some minutes, I doubt if Frances knew, or that she could have replied with any accuracy to any of these questions.
She was utterly, completely stupefied, and when at last her ideas began to take coherent form again it was only in the shape of increasingly definite pain and self-abasement. Unselfish, radically unselfish as she was, it became for some little time impossible for her to think of, to care for any one but herself, in the shock of revolted, almost outraged, feeling that overwhelmed her. For she was of a nature to be terribly sensitive to mortification, and with such natures, proud, dignified, mentally and morally on a high plane, recognising high ideals as the goal of all endeavour, mortification, paradoxical though it may sound, can be almost a passion.
Not that she dreaded or even thought as yet for a moment of others—outsiders—in this terrible mistake. It was herself as judging herself that she cowered before.
“I who thought myself the soul of modesty and delicacy, as I see now that I did—I, to have imagined such a thing! At my age, older than he—oh, it is dreadful to realise,” and she sat down on some rising ground by the side of the road and covered her burning face with her hands, while slow hot tears forced themselves through her fingers. In these few minutes—a quarter of an hour at most—Frances Morion seemed to herself to have lived years.
”‘No fool like an old fool!’ it is like having the measles in middle age—always worse than at the normal time, they say.”
These and other bitter, absurdly exaggerated cynical remarks passed through her mind, not to be harboured there, however, for her real character, her habitual attitude of mind, could not for long be untrue to themselves.
And “Oh, what a selfish, shamefully selfish, woman I am—I must be!” was the next phase. “I needed this lesson to open my eyes. Yes, indeed, I needed it,” and already, though the pain was still so stinging, the wound so raw, curious suggestions began to insinuate themselves. If it had been “the real thing,” would not its overthrow have affected her somewhat differently—would not the true malady have developed other symptoms?
For the moment she put these vague hints aside, to be taken out and examined into more at leisure, with possibly some salutary, health-restoring result, and with new resolution tried to concentrate her mind on what now lay before her—on the thorny, self-effacing path which duty, affection, all the associations and motives of her life pointed out as the only one she could tread.
There were alleviations—alleviations and mitigations—of her present suffering, and by degrees the first, perhaps the greatest, of these gradually crept into her thoughts. No one need ever know; more than this, it would be wrong, disloyal to others, to allow her secret to escape. This was so clearly binding upon her that it reconciled her to the necessity, already making itself felt, of to some extent acting a part. And the very relief of knowing that she must thus shield herself brought with it another, as yet faint, but yet suggestive, source of support.
“If it were really that I had got to care for him—thoroughly, genuinely in that way,” she asked herself, “would I so soon be ready to accept any sort of comfort?” But again for the present she put these ideas aside, concentrating all her powers in the direction of the immediate action required of her. “All I can do to help him, I must do,” she thought; “as to that there can be no sort of question. I must as far as I possibly can tacitly familiarise Betty with the idea of what is coming, for he is good and true, I feel convinced, and worthy of her. Oh if I had but known it sooner! It would have been nothing but happiness.”