and then to dislike, and soon to shrink away from, and presently to be indignant.  Sometimes it was just as if she didn’t belong to herself, wasn’t her own at all, but was regarded as a universal thing, a sort of beauty-of-all-work.  Really men . . .  And she found herself involved in queer vague quarrels, being curiously hated.  Really women . . .  And when the war came, and she flung herself into it along with everybody else, it finished her.  Really generals . . .

The war finished Scrap.  It killed the one man she felt safe with, whom she would have married, and it finally disgusted her with love.  Since then she had been embittered.  She was struggling as angrily in the sweet stuff of life as a wasp got caught in honey.  Just as desperately did she try to unstick her wings.  It gave her no pleasure to outdo other women; she didn’t want their tiresome men.  What could one do with men when one had got them?  None of them would talk to her of anything but the things of love, and how foolish and fatiguing that became after a bit.  It was as though a healthy person with a normal hunger was given nothing whatever to eat but sugar.  Love, love . . . the very word made her want to slap somebody.  “Why should I love you?  Why should I?” she would ask amazed sometimes when somebody was trying—­somebody was always trying—­to propose to her.  But she never got a real answer, only further incoherence.

A deep cynicism took hold of the unhappy Scrap.  Her inside grew hoary with disillusionment, while her gracious and charming outside continued to make the world more beautiful.  What had the future in it for her?  She would not be able, after such a preparation, to take hold of it.  She was fit for nothing; she had wasted all this time being beautiful.  Presently she wouldn’t be beautiful, and what then?  Scrap didn’t know what then, it appalled her to wonder even.  Tired as she was of being conspicuous she was at least used to that, she had never known anything else; and to become inconspicuous, to fade, to grow shabby and dim, would probably be most painful.  And once she began, what years and years of it there would be!  Imagine, thought Scrap, having most of one’s life at the wrong end.  Imagine being old for two or three times as long as being young.  Stupid, stupid.  Everything was stupid.  There wasn’t a thing she wanted to do.  There were thousands of things she didn’t want to do.  Avoidance, silence, invisibility, if possible unconsciousness—­these negations were all she asked for a moment; and here, even here, she was not allowed a minute’s peace, and this absurd woman must come pretending, merely because she wanted to exercise power and make her go to bed and make her—­hideous—­drink castor oil, that she thought she was ill.

“I’m sure,” said Mrs. Fisher, who felt the cold of the stone beginning to come through and knew she could not sit much longer, “you’ll do what is reasonable.  Your mother would wish—­have you a mother?”