“What do you feel?”
“I was in love with him. You knew it.”
“You liked him,” insisted Grace patiently.
“No—loved him. I know. Dear, your theories are sound in a general way, but what is a girl going to do about it when she loves a man? You say a young girl can't love—doesn't know how. But I do love, though it is true that I don't know how to love very wisely. What is the use in denying it? This winter has been a deafening, stupefying fever to me. The sheer noise of it stunned me until I forgot how I did feel about anything. Then—I don't know—somehow, in the rain out there, I began to wake... Dear, the old instincts, the old desires, the old truths, came back out of chaos; that full feeling here”—she laid her fingers on her throat—“the sense of expectancy, the restless hope growing out of torpid acquiescence—all returned; and, dearest, with them all came memories of him. What am I to do? Could you tell me?”
For a long while Mrs. Ferrall sat in troubled silence, her hand shading her eyes. Sylvia, leaning over her desk, idling with pen and pencil, looked around from time to time, as though awaiting the opinion of some specialist who, in full possession of the facts, now had become responsible for the patient.
“If you marry him,” said Mrs. Ferrall quietly, “your life will become a hell.”
“Yes. But would it make life any easier for him?” asked Sylvia.
“How—to know that you had been dragged down?”
“No. I mean could I do anything for him?”
“No woman ever did. That is a sentimental falsehood of the emotional. No woman ever did help a man in that way. Sylvia, if love were the only question, and if you do truly love him, I—well, I suppose I'd be fool enough to advise you to be a fool. Even then you'd be sorry. You know what your future may be; you know what you are fitted for. What can you do without Howard? In this town your rôle would be a very minor one without Howard's money, and you know it.”