The best that she could see. She pressed her hands against her head. Some fugitive echo of memory lay in the words, sight, sight. "The last betrayal and the ultimate unworthiness is the defilement of the vision." That mad fanatic at Thraile, that warped religious maniac, what right had he, with his crude theories of self-mortification and God's vengeance, to come before her now with his dark prophecies of vision? Sight? What sight? Had she not always done the best that she had seen?
"We can only worship what we see." All very well to talk. She pressed her hands against her eyes and in the darkness she tried to read again the visions she had seen.
She saw the God of her early school-days, a benign and patriarchal creation of her own emotions, bidding her be submissive and content, and smiling on her with approbation that curiously resembled Mrs. Hancock's.
She saw Clare; and immediately her desires altered. To be good meant to be gay, to be loved, to be beautiful, to dance through life right up to Godfrey's arms.
She shivered. That vision had soon died. Beauty and gay success in love could not be hers. What vision then? She saw her mother, the passionate devotee of the great god of People. She saw herself accepting now new standards. The thing that mattered in Marshington was neither service nor love but marriage, marriage respectable and unequivocal, marriage financially sound, eugenically advisable, and socially correct. She had sought it. Oh, no doubt she had sought it but never found, for though Godfrey Neale had kissed her he had not unnaturally forgotten. In the emotional reaction after a crisis of fear, she had found the only sign of the satisfaction that she had sought as love.
Then she had gone to Thraile. She saw more clearly now the reeling nightmare of those days, when she had lost all touch with sane reality. At Hardrascliffe and at Marshington she could deal with a given crisis according to known rules, but at Thraile she had been swept right off her feet, having no standard of her own to hold by. She had wanted to help Connie and had followed a policy of blind opportunism, blundering from one notion to another. Connie in trouble must be married. Connie, when married, must have life made tolerable. This she had seen, and, seeing thus, had acted. But never once had Muriel Hammond, Muriel who sought before all things excellence of conduct, never once had she thought clearly about what it all meant. She had never once lifted her head higher than Connie's, but had left to Mr. Todd the task of trying to make clear what her sister and Ben had done. But when you faced it frankly, you saw that it all came to this. At Marshington the only thing that mattered was marriage. Connie, who knew this, who was wild and reckless but who at least was brave, had ruined her life and Ben's, had saddened Eric's, and had brought her family to bitter shame. Muriel, with no less intention but less courage, had sat at home and waited and grown bitter. And now she was still waiting and her youth was passing by.
And yet, and yet, it had not been her own way to want this only. A respectable marriage had not always been the one goal of her life. She had dreamed dreams. She had seen visions, but her visions had faded before the opinion of others; she had lacked the courage of her dreams. And now there was left to her nothing but Marshington. She could not even go away. It had trapped her in the end, for she had shut her eyes to anything beyond its streets, and was a prisoner now to her own blindness.
"The only thing that Marshington cares about is sex-success." Delia Vaughan had said that. Muriel did not believe her. It was true enough, quite true.
Her hands dropped from her face. She looked as she had looked thirteen years ago across the moonlit fields to the dark city.
Well, Delia had been proved right at last. What next?