"Oh, leave your vile little posturings out!"
"I'm not a coward," she repeated patiently. "Standing out there a moment ago, I thought how easy it would be to get pneumonia and die and end everything—Don't say 'another emotion'! A coward would have. But I'd decided to accept the consequences. I was on the point of telling Jack he could marry me, if he wanted to, when that car came and everybody started running about.... I tried to catch him before he left, I ran after the car.... That's all, Jim."
Looking at her, he saw that she was indeed too much bruised to feel.
"And now?" he asked.
Barbara shook her head hopelessly and stared across the room out of the window.
"He can do what he likes with me. He can marry me and beat me. He can sit—dear God! he can sit as he sat to-night, looking at me as though I were a bundle of rags and sores that had thrown its arms round him. He can tell people.... Or he can keep me to himself and sneer and torture me when he's in the mood. He can take me and break my heart and fling me away after a week, if he likes. There's nothing, nothing I won't do!"
Her vehemence startled him for a moment, but her tone and phrasing were too rhetorical to be convincing.
"I admire your capacity for getting the last ounce even out of repentance," Loring murmured.
For a moment Barbara did not seem to have heard him; then she got up and walked out of the smoking-room and across the hall to a studded oak door. She rattled the handle for a moment and then came back.
"Where's the key of the chapel?" she demanded. "You believe in something, I suppose? And I suppose you admit that even I would stop short of some things. Give me the key! I'll swear to you on the image of the Blessed Virgin——"