"Are you going to accept this post in Canada?" she asked sourly.
"Not if you promise to chuck the militant business and also these epicene freaks in Chelsea. I should like you to carry on at the hospital until you're qualified."
"You seem to forget," she said, "that I'm like a soldier under orders. If necessary, I must sacrifice my medical career. I also think your remarks about The Brotherhood simply beastly. I'll do no such thing."
Eventually it came to this:
"I don't care whether women get the vote or not. I think our Chelsea friends are the most pestilential set of rotters on the face of the earth. I've got my way to make in the world. Help me to do it. Let us get married in decent fashion and go out together."
"I being just the appanage of the rising young architect? Thank you for the insult."
And so the argument went on until he delivered his ultimatum:
"If I don't get a sensible message by twelve o'clock to-morrow at the club, I'll never see or hear of you as long as I live."
He went out of the flat. She sent no message. He did not return. After a while, a lawyer came and equitably adjusted joint financial responsibilities. And that was the end of the romance—if romance it could be termed. From that day to this, Harry Shileto had vanished from her ken.
His exit had been the end of the romance; but it had marked the beginning of tragedy. A man can love and, however justifiably, ride away—gloriously free. But the woman, for all her clamoring insistence, has to pay the debt from which man is physically exempt. Harry Shileto had already arrived in Canada when Camilla discovered the dismaying fact of her sex's disability. But her pride kept her silent, and of the child born in secret and dead within a fortnight, Harry Shileto never heard. Then, after a few months of dejection and loss of bearings and lassitude, the war thundered on the world. Her friend, John Donovan, the surgeon, was going out to France. She went to him and said: "I've wasted my time. It will take years for me to qualify. Let me go out and nurse." So, through his influence, she had stepped into the midst of the suffering of the war, and there she still remained and found great happiness in great work.