Horrible details recurred to her.

“Why, among other things, did I put my knuckles in his neck—­deliberately to hurt him?”

She tried to sound the humorous note.

“Are you aware, Ann Veronica, you nearly throttled that gentleman?”

Then she reviled her own foolish way of putting it.

“You ass and imbecile, Ann Veronica!  You female cad!  Cad!  Cad!...  Why aren’t you folded up clean in lavender—­as every young woman ought to be?  What have you been doing with yourself?...”

She raked into the fire with the poker.

“All of which doesn’t help me in the slightest degree to pay back that money.”

That night was the most intolerable one that Ann Veronica had ever spent.  She washed her face with unwonted elaboration before she went to bed.  This time, there was no doubt, she did not sleep.  The more she disentangled the lines of her situation the deeper grew her self-disgust.  Occasionally the mere fact of lying in bed became unendurable, and she rolled out and marched about her room and whispered abuse of herself—­usually until she hit against some article of furniture.

Then she would have quiet times, in which she would say to herself, “Now look here!  Let me think it all out!”

For the first time, it seemed to her, she faced the facts of a woman’s position in the world—­the meagre realities of such freedom as it permitted her, the almost unavoidable obligation to some individual man under which she must labor for even a foothold in the world.  She had flung away from her father’s support with the finest assumption of personal independence.  And here she was—­in a mess because it had been impossible for her to avoid leaning upon another man.  She had thought—­What had she thought?  That this dependence of women was but an illusion which needed only to be denied to vanish.  She had denied it with vigor, and here she was!

She did not so much exhaust this general question as pass from it to her insoluble individual problem again:  “What am I to do?”

She wanted first of all to fling the forty pounds back into Ramage’s face.  But she had spent nearly half of it, and had no conception of how such a sum could be made good again.  She thought of all sorts of odd and desperate expedients, and with passionate petulance rejected them all.

She took refuge in beating her pillow and inventing insulting epithets for herself.  She got up, drew up her blind, and stared out of window at a dawn-cold vision of chimneys for a time, and then went and sat on the edge of her bed.  What was the alternative to going home?  No alternative appeared in that darkness.

It seemed intolerable that she should go home and admit herself beaten.  She did most urgently desire to save her face in Morningside Park, and for long hours she could think of no way of putting it that would not be in the nature of unconditional admission of defeat.