But as she said it her conscience rose in contradiction and told her that it was her fault.  Her fault in the very beginning for drawing him into an intimacy that his youth and inexperience made dangerous.  Her fault for sacrificing, yes, sacrificing him to that impulse to give pleasure which had only meant giving pleasure to herself at his expense.  Her fault for endlessly refining on the facts of life, till she lost all feeling of its simpler and more obvious issues.  Kitty had been right when she told her that she treated men as if they were disembodied spirits.  She had trusted too much to her own subtlety.  That was how all her blunders, had been made.  If she had been cold as well as subtle—­but Lucia was capable of passionate indiscreet things to be followed by torments of her pride.  Her pride had only made matters worse.  It was her pride, in the beginning, that had blinded her.  When she had told Kitty that she was not the sort of woman to let this sort of thing happen with this sort of man, she had summed up her abiding attitude to one particular possibility.  She had trusted to the social gulf to keep her safe, apart.  Afterwards, she knew that she had not trusted so much to the social gulf.  She had not been quite so proud; neither, since Kitty had opened her eyes, had she been so blind; but she had been ten times more foolish.  Her mind had refused to dwell upon Kitty’s dreadful suggestions, because they were dreadful.  Unconscious of her sex, she had remained unconscious of her power; she had trusted (unconsciously) to the power of another woman for protection.  Flossie had, so to speak, detached and absorbed the passionate part of Keith Rickman; by which process the rest of him was left subtler and more pure.  She had thought she could really deal with him now as a disembodied spirit.  And so under the shelter of his engagement she had, after her own manner, let herself go.

These thoughts swept through her brain like one thought, as she contemplated the misery she had made.  They came with the surging of the blood in her cheeks, so swiftly that she had no time to see that they hardly exhausted the aspects of her case.  And it was not her own case that she was thinking of.

She turned to him pleading.  “Don’t you see that I could never forgive myself if I thought that I had hurt her?  You are not going to make me so unhappy?”

“Do you mean, am I going to marry her?”

She said nothing; for she was conscious now, conscious and ashamed of using a power that she had no right to have; ashamed, too, of being forced to acknowledge the truth of the thing she had so passionately denied.

“You needn’t be afraid,” he said.  “Of course I am going to marry her.”

He turned away from her as he had turned away five years ago, with the same hopeless sense of dishonour and defeat.  She called him back, as she had called him back five years ago, and for the same purpose, of delivering a final stab.  Only that this time she knew it was a stab; and her own heart felt the pain as she delivered it.