pretend to ignore it?  Her personal experience might have instigated a less clear and less intrepid nature to take advantage of the opportunity for playing the popular innocent, who runs about with astonished eyes to find herself in so hunting a world, and wins general compassion, if not shelter in unsuspected and unlicenced places.  There is perpetually the inducement to act the hypocrite before the hypocrite world, unless a woman submits to be the humbly knitting housewife, unquestioningly worshipful of her lord; for the world is ever gracious to an hypocrisy that pays homage to the mask of virtue by copying it; the world is hostile to the face of an innocence not conventionally simpering and quite surprised; the world prefers decorum to honesty.  ’Let me be myself, whatever the martyrdom!’ she cried, in that phase of young sensation when, to the blooming woman; the putting on of a mask appears to wither her and reduce her to the show she parades.  Yet, in common with her sisterhood, she owned she had worn a sort of mask; the world demands it of them as the price of their station.  That she had never worn it consentingly, was the plea for now casting it off altogether, showing herself as she was, accepting martyrdom, becoming the first martyr of the modern woman’s cause—­a grand position! and one imaginable to an excited mind in the dark, which does not conjure a critical humour, as light does, to correct the feverish sublimity.  She was, then, this martyr, a woman capable of telling the world she knew it, and of, confessing that she had behaved in disdain of its rigider rules, according to her own ideas of her immunities.  O brave!

But was she holding the position by flight?  It involved the challenge of consequences, not an evasion of them.

She moaned; her mental steam-wheel stopped; fatigue brought sleep.

She had sensationally led her rebellious wits to The Crossways, distilling much poison from thoughts on the way; and there, for the luxury of a still seeming indecision, she sank into oblivion.

CHAPTER XI

Recounts the journey in A chariot, with A certain amount of dialogue, and A small incident on the road

In the morning the fight was over.  She looked at the signpost of The Crossways whilst dressing, and submitted to follow, obediently as a puppet, the road recommended by friends, though a voice within, that she took for the intimations of her reason, protested that they were wrong, that they were judging of her case in the general, and unwisely—­ disastrously for her.

The mistaking of her desires for her reasons was peculiar to her situation.

‘So I suppose I shall some day see The Crossways again,’ she said, to conceive a compensation in the abandonment of freedom.  The night’s red vision of martyrdom was reserved to console her secretly, among the unopened lockers in her treasury of thoughts.  It helped to sustain her; and she was too conscious of things necessary for her sustainment to bring it to the light of day and examine it.  She had a pitiful bit of pleasure in the gratification she imparted to Danvers, by informing her that the journey of the day was backward to Copsley.