With the exaggeration of this thought she was able to get herself in hand.  She was able to debate so absurd a suggestion, to argue it down, and turn it into ridicule.  But she yielded again as the Voice that talked with her urged the plea:  “I didn’t say you knew it consciously.  You couldn’t cry ‘My own!  My own!’ to a man whom up to that point you had treated with disdain.  But your subliminal being had begun to know him, to recognize him as—­”

To elude this fancy she set herself to recapitulating his weak points.  She could see why Ashley should thrust him aside as being “not a gentleman.”  He fell short, in two or three points, of the English standard.  That he had little experience of life as it is lived, of its balance and proportion and perspective, was clear from the way in which he had flung himself and his money into the midst of the Guion disasters.  No man of the world could possibly have done that.  The very fact of his doing it made him lawfully a subject for some of the epithets Ashley applied to him.  Almost any one would apply them who wanted to take him from a hostile point of view.

She forgot herself so far as to smile faintly.  It was just the sort of deficiency which she had it in her power to make up.  The reflection set her to dreaming when she wanted to be doing something else.  She could have brought him the dower of all the things he didn’t know, while he could give her....  But she caught herself again.

“What kind of a woman am I?”

She began to be afraid.  She began to see in herself the type she most detested—­the woman who could deliberately marry a man and not be loyal to him.  She was on the threshold of marriage with Ashley, and she was thinking of the marvel of life with some one else.  When one of the inner Voices denied this charge, another pressed it home by nailing the precise incident on which her heart had been dwelling.  “You were thinking of this—­of that—­of the time on the stairs when, with his face close to yours, he asked you if you loved the man you’d be going away with—­of the evening at the gate when your hand was in his and it was so hard to take it away.  He has no position to offer you.  There’s nothing remarkable about him beyond a capacity for making money.  He’s beneath you from every point of view except that of his mere manhood, and yet you feel that you could let yourself slip into that—­into the strength and peace of it—­”

She caught herself again—­impatiently.  It was no use!  There was something wilful within her, something that could be called by even a stronger name, that worked back to the point from which she tried to flee, whatever means she took to get away from it.

She returned to her work, persuading Cousin Cherry to go home to tea and leave her to finish the task alone.  Even while she did so one of the inner Voices taunted her by saying:  “That’ll leave you all the more free to dream of—­him.”