“But you will—lots—it’s the easiest thing in the world—But that’s not what’s happened this afternoon exactly. It’s—Oh, it’s a muddle, a detestable, horrible, disgusting muddle!”
She went to the wash-stand and began sponging her cheeks with cold water; for they were burning hot. Still sponging them and trembling slightly she turned and explained in the high pitched voice of nervous excitement: “Alfred Perrott says I’ve promised to marry him, and I say I never did. Sinclair says he’ll shoot himself if I don’t marry him, and I say, ‘Well, shoot yourself!’ But of course he doesn’t—they never do. And Sinclair got hold of me this afternoon and began bothering me to give an answer, and accusing me of flirting with Alfred Perrott, and told me I’d no heart, and was merely a Siren, oh, and quantities of pleasant things like that. So at last I said to him, ‘Well, Sinclair, you’ve said enough now. You can just let me go.’ And then he caught me and kissed me—the disgusting brute—I can still feel his nasty hairy face just there—as if he’d any right to, after what he’d said!”
She sponged a spot on her left cheek energetically.
“I’ve never met a man that was fit to compare with a woman!” she cried; “they’ve no dignity, they’ve no courage, they’ve nothing but their beastly passions and their brute strength! Would any woman have behaved like that—if a man had said he didn’t want her? We’ve too much self-respect; we’re infinitely finer than they are.”
She walked about the room, dabbing her wet cheeks with a towel. Tears were now running down with the drops of cold water.
“It makes me angry,” she explained, drying her eyes.
Rachel sat watching her. She did not think of Evelyn’s position; she only thought that the world was full of people in torment.
“There’s only one man here I really like,” Evelyn continued; “Terence Hewet. One feels as if one could trust him.”
At these words Rachel suffered an indescribable chill; her heart seemed to be pressed together by cold hands.
“Why?” she asked. “Why can you trust him?”