After all the struggling, had it come to this?  Was the author of the Beach opinion of her a man whom she must greatly admire?...

Behind her stood the stairway, which led on up to mamma and the embracing security of the victorious order.  Behind her also stood the man, the royal giver of the granary where finer-feathered birds now made merry among the spoils.  With what speech should Cally Heth, mocked and jeered by her feeble “I’m sorry,” turn now and pass him?...

She heard the sound of his unequal footstep, and then his voice behind her, stirred with a sudden feeling: 

“Why, it’s not a thing to be sorry about—­how could you possibly have thought otherwise?...  Don’t you suppose I realize what cause I’ve given you to—­to distrust and dislike me?  You’d be more than human if you could forgive and forget—­what I said to you one night.  How could you, when it was so unforgivable?  And since then—­”

“Don’t!” Carlisle said, in a muffled sort of voice.  And then, clearly and distinctly:  “Don’t!...  I can’t quite stand that!”

She turned on the old floor, with the sound of her own strengthening voice, and came again face to face with the man, V.V.  There had seemed to come to her a light.  And back into her smooth young cheek trickled that color so loved by her betrothed, who had not bought the Settlement House after all....

She was a brilliantly successful girl, the chosen wife of the most shiningly eligible of men; and he was a lame slum doctor in a worn-out suit, beneath her notice as a man altogether.  And yet, as Hugo stood above her in all those material aspects which had always summed up her whole demand of life, so this man stood above her in some more subtle and mysterious way.  And it had always been so:  by bright swift flickers of intuition she had seemed suddenly to see that now.  All the restlessness and discontent which the thought and sight of him had power to awake in her from the beginning came from just this; and she had never been able to put him down, no matter how she had chafed and denounced, because the final fact had always been that he, in his queer way, stood above her ...

And now, in this unsteadied moment, with all hope of bringing him down beaten finally to death, there had seemed to rise and beckon a finer way of bridging this gap between them.  All that was best in the girl suddenly rose, demanding for once to be allowed to meet the shabby alien on his own reckless level.

“Look here,” said Cally, with a kind of tremulous eagerness, “I want to tell you something....”

Yes, surely it was all a matter between herself and him:  she could meet his eyes now with no sense that did not add to her curious inner exaltation.  Had not these eyes said to her from the beginning that they would give her no peace till she came to this?...

“You were right to say what you did that night.  A puff of wind blew the boat over after he got out.  Mr. Dalhousie never knew I was upset.”