An old, wise, kind woman, or an old priest who had seen and forgiven much, or men who knew and pitied youth, would have understood.  Neither of the men to whom she spoke realized the significance of that childishly pitiful confession.  Champneys felt that she had shamed his name, belittled the sacred Family which was his fetish; Glenn thought she had made a fool of him for her own amusement.  Never again would he trust a woman, he told himself.  And in his pain and shame, his smarting sense of having been duped, his hideous revulsion of feeling, he spoke out brutally.  Nancy was left in no doubt as to the estimation in which he now held her.  And she understood that it was his pride, even more than his love, that suffered.

She made no further attempt to explain or to exculpate herself; what was the use?  She knew that had they changed places, had Glenn been in her shoes and she in his, her judgment had not been thus swift and merciless.  Her larger love would have understood, and pitied, and forgiven.  Pride!  They talked of Pride, and they talked of Name.  But she could only feel that the one love she had ever known, or perhaps ever was to know, was going from her, must go from her, unforgiving, as if she had done it some irreparable wrong.  She looked from one wrathful, accusing face to the other, like a child that has been beaten.  How could Glenn, who had seemed to love her so greatly, turn against her so instantly?  Not even—­Peter Champneys—­had looked at her as Glenn was looking at her now!  And of a sudden she felt cold, and old, and sad, and inexpressibly tired.  So this was what men were like, then!  They always blamed.  And they never, never understood.  She would not forget.

She checked the impulse to cry aloud to Glenn, to try once more to make him understand.  Her eyes darkened, and two bright spots burnt in her cheeks.  Without a further word or glance she walked out of the room and left the two standing close together.  So stepped Anne Champneys into her womanhood.

She locked her door upon herself.  Then she went over, after her fashion, and stared at herself in her mirror.  The herself staring back at her startled her—­the flushed cheeks, the mouth like coral, the eyes glowing like jewels under straight black brows.  The ropes of red hair seemed alive, too; the whole figure radiated a personality that could be dynamic, once its powers should be fully aroused.

She viewed the woman in the glass impersonally, as if it had been a stranger’s face looking at her.  That vivid creature couldn’t be Nancy Simms, not quite three years ago the Baxter slavey, the same Nancy that Peter Champneys had shrunk from with aversion, and that Glenn had repudiated to-night!

“Yes,—­it’s me,” she murmured.  “But I ain’t—­I mean I am not really ugly any more.  I’m—­I don’t know just what I am—­or whether I ought to like or hate me—­” But even while she shook her head, the face in the glass changed; the mouth drooped, the color faded, the light in the eyes went out.  “But whatever I am, I’m not enough to make anybody keep on loving me.”  Then, because she was just a girl, and a very bewildered, sad, and undisciplined girl, she put her red head down on her dressing-table and wept despairingly.