Joan held the letter out towards her. "This!" she panted. "This beastly thing!"
Milly saw the handwriting and turned pale. "How dare you open my letters, Joan?"
"I open your letters? Look at the envelope; he forgot to put your Christian name; it came addressed to me."
Milly snatched the letter away. "You beast!" she said furiously, "you cad! you needn't have read it all through."
"I didn't read it all through, but I read enough to know what you've been doing. Good God! You—you common little brute!"
Milly turned and faced her; her eyes were wild but resolute, like an animal's at bay. "Go on!" she said, "go on, Joan, call me anything you like, but at the same time suppose you try to realize that I'm also a human being. Do you imagine that I really mind your knowing about Jack and me? I don't care! I've wanted to tell you scores of times. Yes, we do meet each other in the sand-pit every Saturday, and he makes love to me and I like it; do you hear? I enjoy it; I like being kissed and all the rest. I love Jack because he gives me what I want; if he's common I don't care, he's all I've got or am ever likely to get. You stand there calling me names and putting on your high and mighty air as though I were some low creature that had defiled you; and why? Only because I'm natural and you're not. You're a freak and I'm just a normal woman. I like men they mean a lot to me, and there aren't so many men in Seabourne that a girl can afford to pick and choose. How am I going to find the sort of man you would approve of in Seabourne; tell me that? And where's the harm? Lots of other girls like men too, but they go to dances and things and meet what you, I suppose, would call gentlemen. But it's all one; they do very much what Jack and I have done, only you don't know it, you with your books and your doctoring and your Elizabeth! Well, if I'd had a chance given me to meet your precious gentleman, perhaps I'd be engaged to be married by now, instead of having to be satisfied with Jack in a sand-pit." She began to laugh hysterically. "Jack in a sand-pit, how funny it sounds; Jack in a sand-pit!" She stopped suddenly and stared into Joan's eyes. "Listen," she said seriously, "listen, you queer creature; haven't you learnt anything from all your medical books? Don't you know that some people's natures are like mine, and that they can't help giving way sometimes to their impulses; and after all, Joan, where's the harm; tell me that? Where's the harm to anyone in what Jack and I have done? Perhaps I'll marry him—he wants me to—but meanwhile where's the harm in our being happy, even if it is in a sand-pit on Saturday afternoons?"
Joan looked at her in amazement. This was Milly, beside whom she had slept for years; this was her sister, talking like some abandoned woman, quite without shame, glorying in her lapse. This was the real Milly; all the others had been unreal, this was the natural Milly. Something in her own thoughts made her pause. Natural, yes, natural. This was Milly upholding the nature she had inherited, fighting for its pleasures, its gratifications; Milly was only being natural, being herself. Were other people like that when they were themselves? Was that why a housemaid they had had years ago had left because she was going to have a baby? Had she, too, been just natural? And what was being natural? Was it being like Milly, or like the housemaid with her sin great and heavy within her? What gave people these impulses which they would not or could not resist? Was it nature working on them for her own ends? Milly and the housemaid, she coupled them together in her mind. They were both human beings and what they had done was very human, too; very pitiful and sordid, like most human happenings.
She looked at her sister where she stood half dressed, her head drooping a little now, her cheeks flushed. She was so thin. It was touching the way her thin arms hung down from the short sleeves of her vest; they were like young twigs waiting to complete their growth. Seen like this there was so little of Milly to upbraid, she looked so childish. Yet she was not childish; she was wiser than Joan, she had probed into some secret. How funny!
"Come here," Joan said unsteadily; "come here to me, Milly."
Milly went to her, hiding her head on her shoulder. She began to cry. "Joan, listen, I didn't mean half I said just now, all the beastly, coarse things, I didn't mean any of them I know it's wrong, it's awful—and I've been so horribly ashamed—only I couldn't help it. I just couldn't help it!"