For after him there was the gentleman who came to Madame Ponting’s, and after him, Mr. Gorst, who came to Evans’s, and after Mr. Gorst—­Last year Maggie could not have believed that there could be another after him.  For each of these persons she would willingly have died.  To each of them her soul leaped up and bowed itself, swept forward like a flame bowed and driven by the wind.

As long as each loved her, the flame burned steadily and still.  Maggie’s soul was appeased for a season.  As each left her, the flame died out in tears, and her pulses beat feebly, and her life languished.  Maggie went from flame to flame; for the hours when there was nobody to love simply dropped into the darkness and were forgotten.  She left off living when she had to leave off loving.  To be sure there was always Mr. Mumford.  He was a tobacconist, and he lived over the shop in a house fronting the pier, a unique and dominant situation.  And he was prepared to overlook the past and make Maggie his wife and mistress of the house fronting the pier.  Unfortunately, Maggie did not love him.  You couldn’t love Mr. Mumford.  You could only be sorry for him.

But though Maggie went from flame to flame, there were long periods of placidity when she loved nothing but her work, and was as good as gold.  Maggie’s father wouldn’t believe it.  He had never forgiven her, not even when the doctor told him that there was no sense in which the poor girl could be held responsible; they should have looked after her better, that was all.  Maggie’s father, the grocer, did not deal in smooth, extenuating phrases.  He called such madness sin.  So did Maggie in her hours of peace and sanity.  She was terrified when she felt it coming on, and hid her face from her doom.  But when it came she went to meet it, uplifted, tremulous, devoted, carrying her poor scorched heart in her hand for sacrifice.

Each time that she loved, it was as if her former sins had been blotted out; for there came a merciful forgetfulness that renewed, almost, her innocence.  Her heart had its own perverted constancy.  No lover was like her last lover, and for him she rejected and repudiated the past.

And each time that she loved she was torn asunder.  She gave herself in pieces; her heart first, then her soul, then, if it must needs be, her body.  The finest first, then all that was left of her.  That was her unique merit, what marked her from the rest.

Majendie, she divined by instinct, had recognised her quality.  He was the only one who had.  And he had asked nothing of her.  She would have lived miserably for Charlie Gorst.  She would have died with joy for Mr. Majendie.  And Maggie feared death worse than life, however miserable.