It is all pardonable, all this.  It is an occurrence as common in big cities as are the lofty chimneys, and besmirching haze which, on the horizon, herald the approach of a place where men and women are gathered closely together.  But it is a position which, with the present conditions of tortured conventionality, is impossible, untenable.  Either a woman is the wife of a man, or his mistress; and if the latter then, as Janet has said, she had better see to her settlement first and build her romance, if so she chose, upon its foundations.  A man may keep closed the gates of matrimony until the last moment, but when he finds that only through them can he gain the woman he loves, then no amount of principle and no desire of freedom will hinder him from swinging them wide and following her through.  On the other hand also, he will make but little attempt to unlock those very gates, so long as there is a shadow of the prospect within his mind that she will meet him outside.

To Sally, such reasoning as this would have robbed her of all romance—­the shattering siege gun that thunders through a town, and tumbles the images from their altars in the little church.

Two ways there were in which to view the matter truly.  If she were the great woman, she would have loved for the love of love itself—­let it end where it might.  If she were the revolutionary seeking truth, demanding freedom, then she would have loved the transaction for the transaction’s sake—­let it end to-morrow if it willed.

But Sally was neither.  She took a middle course.  She neither loved wholly for the sake of love, nor could she make her transaction and be proud of it.  Like thousands of other women, she liked to think that she was loved in return and that it would never end.  Like thousands of other women, she believed that what the man had taken, that he would keep, because in the eyes of God and all the other phrases of romantic sentimentalism, they were one.

But this is conventionality, and conventionality has to be thanked for it.  So women have been brought up; and until that army, of which Sally now is a deserter, has forced its marches and driven its enemy from the field, women will so continue to think, so continue to act, so continue to be broken into dust, the grains of which any wind may carry into the west where the sun sets in deep crimson.

That night when Sally returned from Kew, Traill had noticed her depression.

“What’s Miss Hallard been saying to you?” he asked.  “Telling you that you’re leading a terrible life, I suppose.”

“No, why should she?  Do you think I am, Jack?”

“Me?  I should hope not, since I’m the cause of it.  Do you feel you’re doing anything very terrible?  Here—­put your arms round my neck—­kiss me—­God bless your little heart—­you couldn’t do anything terrible.  Now, are we going to sit and mope, or shall we go out to supper?”

That meant that they were going to supper, and in half an hour she was as happy again as a child.