He stood quite dumb.  The girl’s newly-revealed personality seemed to fill the room.  He felt crowded out.  She was, at that stage, absolutely mistress of the situation....  She passed him carelessly by, flung herself into the easy-chair and crossed her legs.  As though he were looking at some person in another world, he realized that she was wearing shoes of shapely cut, and silk stockings.

“Our engagement,” she went on, “was at first the dearest thing in life to me.  It could have been the most wonderful thing in life.  I am only an ordinary person with an ordinary character, but I have the capacity to love unselfishly, and I am at heart as faithful and as good as any other woman.  But there is my birthright.  I have had three years of sordid and utterly miserable life, teaching squalid, dirty, unlovable children things they had much better not know.  I have lived here, here in Detton Magna, among the smuts and the mists, where the flowers seem withered and even the meadows are stony, where the people are hard and coarse as their ugly houses, where virtue is ugly, and vice is ugly, and living is ugly, and death is fearsome.  And now you see what I have chosen—­not in a moment’s folly, mind, because I am not foolish; not in a moment’s passion, either, because until now the only real feeling I have had in life was for you.  But I have chosen, and I hold to my choice.”

“They won’t let you stay here,” he muttered.

“They needn’t,” she answered calmly.  “There are other ways in which I can at least earn as much as the miserable pittance doled out to me here.  I have avoided even considering them before.  Shall I tell you why?  Because I didn’t want to face the temptation they might bring with them.  I always knew what would happen if escape became hopeless.  It’s the ugliness I can’t stand—­the ugliness of cheap food, cheap clothes, uncomfortable furniture, coarse voices, coarse friends if I would have them.  How do you suppose I have lived here these last three years, a teacher in the national schools?  Look up and down this long, dreary street, at the names above the shops, at the villas in which the tradespeople live, and ask yourself where my friends were to come from?  The clergyman, perhaps?  He is over seventy, a widower, and he never comes near the place.  Why, I’d have been content to have been patronized if there had been anyone here to do it, who wore the right sort of clothes and said the right sort of thing in the right tone.  But the others—­well, that’s done with.”

He remained curiously dumb.  His eyes were fixed upon the fragments of the photograph in the grate.  In a corner of the room an old-fashioned clock ticked wheezily.  A lump of coal fell out on the hearth, which she replaced mechanically with her foot.  His silence seemed to irritate and perplex her.  She looked away from him, drew her chair a little closer to the fire, and sat with her head resting upon her hands.  Her tone had become almost meditative.