But she did not need her answer in words. Ellen’s strength was gone. Her mouth gibbered and her face ran tears. The girl sat down heavily, as though she were facing a job that had to be got over with. She never doubted the truth after that first glimpse of it, never tried to find a loophole. There were simply details to be heard, the future to be considered. She must get the whole story from Ellen, talk it over, make some decision. It would be half the night before she was through with it, and she hated it....
The sun had, in fact, appeared when she emerged from the little room, with a strange tale in her possession, pieced together from the incoherent reminiscences of Ellen. She had forgiven Mrs. Seymour, forgiven her real mother, forgiven all of them for the deception. It was only herself that she could not forgive, herself, humiliated by the degrading masquerade of twenty years.
The knowledge that gave her most courage was her illegitimacy—which was clear from Ellen’s reticence. Better that a thousand times, better a complete outcast, than a respectable nobody. She would go, of course, go in secret, that day. She could take the fewest possible things, put them in her car when no one was looking, and drive to town. What money she needed to get established elsewhere she would have to take from her own account at the bank, as a loan. Ellen had been sworn to say nothing of the discovery.
She stood at her window watching the first sun gild the tops of the knolls, drive the low-lying mists slowly before it. This great knee of a hill, this Penthesilea’s knee, had been a mother’s knee to her, more truly than any human one. There were no relationships in Nature, and this, the memory of her youth, could not be taken from her.... But it would be long before she would see the morning rise from that window again, and she lingered over it; not sentimentally. Why couldn’t she feel sad? Why was she so hard—why had she been so cruel to Ellen? She could hear her now pleading that she had given up Moira for her good, pleading the advantages that had come to them by the sacrifice. Empty advantages, thought their possessor, immorally got and useless to her now, just so many more things to bid good-bye to. The only thing that counted was Hal; if she was bitter it was because she feared yielding to that. Fate had thrown her to Hal and snatched her away in the moment of realization....
She turned from the full day flooding the window and went to her desk. She wanted to write to him now, while she was strongest.
Dear [she wrote]: I know what you would say. You would say that it made no difference, and it would not now. But some day it would, it would grow upon us and smother us. It would be ‘my past,’ and the time would come when your pride might make you hate me, for I would hate myself. I can face this now. I don’t know whether I could face it later. I must go away and do something to absolve myself in my own eyes. And you must not interfere—you cannot. It will be years before I can see you again. I shall never forget these short days, too precious to describe. It is almost enough, that memory, without anything more. Good-bye.
She could write no more, explain no more, though she wanted to. She suddenly reflected on the injustice of having to carry all the responsibility herself. She would have to repulse every advance, however much she might long to accept it.
She laid down her pen—a gold one that matched the other little tools on her writing table—with a gesture that signified she was laying down everything else in the room, the thousand things she had used and loved, the horses, the trees, the long, dear roads, the very air of Thornhill.
XV
The only things she saw at first were as dreary and tragic as herself. It began the moment she left Thornhill, with her last vision of Ellen’s agonizing, tear-stained face hiding at her window on the circular drive. Then came the ride alone, through hot rows of dusty, dull brick houses; the terror-inspiring sight of lives straitened and stagnant through poverty; the abysmal reek of the neighbourhood, near a glue factory, where she left her car in the garage, with instructions to return it on the morrow, and engaged an express man to take her trunk; the long file of weary, hopeful people with little green bills in their hands at the bank—worshippers in the modern temple; the immigrants at Union Station, sprawling on the circular benches about the pillars, hemmed in by their squalid baggage and children; the herding of exhausted, stupid families from the country trains to the street-cars and from the street-cars to the trains; the smoke-patined inferno of the city sweating in the heat after the clean beauty of her home....