He laughed and talked some nonsense about the kneeling. “Poor little woman, she doesn't know what she is doing,” he thought.
“I shouldn't mind what people thought of me,” she said, “not even my own people, who have been brought up with such narrow ideas, you know. They might think what they liked, if I felt I was in the right place at last—the right place for me, I mean.”
Her nervous fingers were involuntarily clutching at his coat sleeve. “Now, any other man——” he thought.
She began to cry. “He won't remember,” she told herself. “It was only his way of being agreeable when he praised me and predicted such wonderful things. And now his good breeding will not allow him to tell me there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of girls in London as likely to——”
“Come, you mustn't cry, Glory. It's not so bad as that.”
She had never seemed to him so beautiful, and he wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her.
“I had no one but you to come to,” she murmured in her confusion. But she was thinking: “Why didn't you stop me before? Why have you let me go on all these months?”
“I must try to think of something, and I'll speak to my friend Rosa—Miss Macquarrie, you know.”
“You are a man,” said Glory, “and I thought perhaps——” But she could not speak of her fool's paradise now, she was so deeply ashamed and abased.
“That's just the difficulty, my dear. If I were not a man, I might so easily help you.”