She was beginning to find a new foundation for her thoughts. Her concentration upon the intensely personal problem vanished.
She used to talk to Delia, in her soft, serious voice, feeling her way towards her new ideas.
"I can't help thinking that Lady Ballimore-Fenton rather likes a fight for the sake of a fight," she reflected. "Surely it doesn't do any good to pretend that all the people who don't quite agree with her are scoundrels. She knows it isn't true."
And Delia would smile and shrug her shoulders. "I believe that you think that we're a poor lot, Muriel."
"I don't. I'm awfully happy here. Only it does sometimes seem very difficult for people to be really interested in questions like housing or illegitimacy and to keep their sense of proportion. So often things are wrong just because nobody quite knows how to put them right. And gentleness is a great power and a great beauty."
Delia smiled her twisted smile. "You put all your platform pearls into your private conversation, Muriel. I wonder? I wonder how much you really care for all this. After all, you are right in one sense. We are all rather apt to lose our sense of proportion. But, because we deal with people in their social capacity, it doesn't mean that we disregard their private selves. We are all of us partly workers for some movement and partly men and women. It's a queer thing, this sex business. You go along quite happily disregarding it for years, then suddenly something comes along that rouses the sleeping thing—and away we go, over the windmills." She caught her breath.
"Martin?" whispered Muriel.
"I suppose so. We've all got a—Martin. That was physical as well as mental suffering. That was why it was so damnable. My mind misses him still—will always, I suppose. My body—well, thank God, who made a singularly imperfect world in order that men might work off their superfluous energies in order to straighten it!"
"But, Delia," cried Muriel, "you don't only do this work in order to forget—as a sort of faute de mieux?"
"No, no." Delia sat down in the arm-chair, her chin on her hand. "No. Two-thirds of me are wholly engrossed in it, and those two-thirds are of the more enduring part of me. You too. You won't always be content to stay with me. You've got the domestic instinct too, which I haven't. And you're not really absorbed heart and mind in the work. It interests you now—but—I wonder. One day some one will call to you, and back you'll go to Marshington."