"It mattered everything. Or rather I thought it did. Do you remember the day of the bombardment of Scarborough? And after the bombardment, in my aunt's house?"
Her face was flooded now with glowing colour, but she spoke on, in her small even voice:
"You kissed me. Perhaps you had forgotten. These things pass easily, don't they? When a man kisses a plain girl. It was kind of you. I expect that you thought I should be pleased and flattered." She paused. "I was pleased."
He made a gesture of protest.
Far away down the park a little burst of cheering rose into the silence and died down. They were beginning the sports that were to be the final entertainment of the fête.
"I was pleased," said Muriel. "I thought of nothing else by day or night. You had kissed me. You, who were the ideal, the prince, of all that Marshington thought splendid. I thought at first, daringly, that it might mean that you could come to care for me, to marry me, to take away from me the reproach of failure. I knew about Clare of course, but I thought her married, and that you had decided that she was quite impossible. I used to grow sick, waiting for the posts. I would lie awake half the night, thinking that a letter might come in the morning. And half the day I would have a pain here, in my side, with the feeling that a letter might come by the afternoon's post. You never wrote. I heard that Clare had come to England. Then, one night at a concert, your mother told me that you were engaged."
"I didn't know," he cried, really remorseful.
"Of course you did not know. I remember that. But, oh, I knew. I don't know what became of me. I think that I fell into a sort of stupor, thinking of all that I had thrown away to follow this, and in the end to fail."
Her voice died away. The aching pain of those past days had left her, but it was not easy to recall them now.
"There's something else," she almost whispered. "Something that I can't tell you much about because it's not my story. I was made to see—the Marshington way—carried to its logical conclusion. Girls do not always wait to be asked. Instinct, you see, is on the side of the tradition. In every woman there must be so much nature—of her womanhood. Take from her all other outlet for vitality; strip her of her other interests, and in some cases the instinct, reinforced by social influence, breaks down her control. I had to stand by helpless and watch—somebody else—come to complete ruin. And just because I had believed what people once had told me, because I had accepted Marshington standards without question, I found myself quite powerless to help. Indeed, I even made things worse, far worse. I think that I went almost mad then. My mind had a kind of shock—— You see, there was nothing left. Even mother—belonged to the things that had failed me. Nothing had happened. People, knowing my life, would have said that I had never known great sorrow. There was just nothing.