The poor fingers ceased their labour of buttoning and unbuttoning; Miss Quincey sat with her shoulders naked as it were to the lash.

“There!” said Mrs. Moon with an air of drawing back the whip and putting it by for the present.  “If I were you I’d cover myself up, and not sit there catching cold with my dress-body off.”

CHAPTER X

Miss Quincey Stands Back

As it happened on a Saturday morning she had plenty of time to think about it.  All the afternoon and the evening and the night lay before her; she was powerless to cope with Sunday and the night beyond that.

The remarkable revelation made to her by Mrs. Moon was so great a shock that her mind refused to realize it all at once.  It was an outrage to all the meek reticences and chastities of her spirit.  But she owned its truth; she saw it now, the thing they all had seen, that she only could not see.

She had sinned the sin of sins, the sin of youth in middle-age.

Now it was not imagination in Miss Quincey, so much as the tradition of St. Sidwell’s, that gave her innocent affection the proportions of a crime.  Miss Quincey had lived all her life in ignorance of her own nature, having spent the best part of five-and-forty years in acquiring other knowledge.  She had nothing to go upon, for she had never been young; or rather she had treated her youth unkindly, she had fed it on saw-dust and given it nothing but arithmetic books to play with, so that its experiences were of no earthly use to her.

And now, if they had only let her alone, she might have been none the wiser; her folly might have put on many quaint disguises, friendship, literary sympathy, intellectual esteem—­there were a thousand delicate subterfuges and innocent hypocrisies, and under any one of them it might have crept about unchallenged in the shadows and blind alleys of thought.  As love pure and simple, if it came to that, there was no harm in it.  Many an old maid, older than she, has just such a secret folded up and put away all sweet and pure; the poor lady does not call it love, but remembrance, which is so to speak love laid in lavender; and she—­who knows?  She might have contrived a little shrine for it somewhere; she had always understood that love was a holy thing.

Unfortunately, when a holy thing has been pulled about and dragged in the mud, it may be as holy as ever but it will never look the same.  In Miss Quincey’s case mortal passion had been shaken out of its sleep and forced to look at itself before it had time to put on a shred of immortality.  In the sudden glare it stood out monstrous, naked and ashamed; she herself had helped to deprive it of all the delicacies and amenities that made it tolerable to thought.  With her own hands she had delivered it up to the stethoscope.

He knew, he knew.  In the mad rush of her ideas one sentence detached itself from the torrent. “He knows well enough what’s the matter with you.”