The pleasant smile on Mrs. Fowler’s lips became suddenly painful.  As if she were suffering a physical hurt, she put her handkerchief to her mouth while she answered: 

“He was once—­but that was before he fell in love with you.  We hoped that you would be able to steady him—­that marriage would make him settle down.”

“Did he drink then?”

“A little—­not enough to make him show it.  I never saw him really show it but once, and then he was dreadfully sick.  Was—­was he like that last night?”

For a long minute, while she looked out of the window at the falling snowflakes, Gabriella did not reply.  Then she spoke in a voice that was sternly accusing.

“You ought to have told me.  I ought to have known.”  Her own wild passion for George was forgotten.  She felt only a sense of outrage, of wounded and stunned resentment, They had treated her as if she were a child or a fool.  That she had been a fool she was not prepared to admit at the instant—­and yet it was less than a year ago, that June night when she had watched George over the clove pinks while her heart melted with happiness.  She had had her way, and she was already regretting her madness.  “Is this what love comes to?” she asked herself bitterly as she watched the white flakes whirling out of the gray sky.  “Is this what it all comes to in the end, or am I different from other women?”

Moistening her dry lips with the tip of her tongue, Mrs. Fowler smiled bravely, though there were tears in her eyes.  “Archibald wanted to, but I wouldn’t let him,” she replied; “I hoped that you would make everything different.  He was so much in love with you.  I thought you could do anything with him.”

Though her reasoning failed to convince Gabriella, it was sufficiently forcible to justify her in her own judgment, and with an easier conscience, she settled comfortably behind the impregnable defences of the maternal instinct.  After all, she had only done what she believed to be best for her boy.  She had not been selfish, she had not even been thoughtless, she had been merely a mother.

“I wish you would tell me what really happened last night, Gabriella,” she said, and her tone showed that she had recovered her shaken confidence in the righteousness of her cause.

“I can’t tell you,” answered Gabriella.  “What good would it do?  George was disgusting, that was all.”  She spoke sternly, for no lingering tenderness softened the judgment of her youth and her injured pride.  How could she possibly have tenderness for a man who had tired of her in four months, who had become so lost to common decency that he could let her see him revoltingly drunk?  And she had held her head so high, she had so despised Jane for her weakness and folly!  At the moment she knew that she was helpless, but deep down within her she felt that this helplessness would not last—­that the wings of her soul were still strong, still free, still untouched by the shame her body had suffered.  With a single effort she could break the net of passion, and escape into the wonderful world which surrounded her.  Like Jane, she had been a fool, but, unlike Jane, she would not stay a fool always.