“I’d rather go as a chorus-girl,” she said.

She was not very clear about the position and duties of a chorus-girl, but it certainly had the air of being a last desperate resort.  There sprang from that a vague hope that perhaps she might extort a capitulation from her father by a threat to seek that position, and then with overwhelming clearness it came to her that whatever happened she would never be able to tell her father about her debt.  The completest capitulation would not wipe out that trouble.  And she felt that if she went home it was imperative to pay.  She would always be going to and fro up the Avenue, getting glimpses of Ramage, seeing him in trains....

For a time she promenaded the room.

“Why did I ever take that loan?  An idiot girl in an asylum would have known better than that!

“Vulgarity of soul and innocence of mind—­the worst of all conceivable combinations.  I wish some one would kill Ramage by accident!...

“But then they would find that check endorsed in his bureau....

“I wonder what he will do?” She tried to imagine situations that might arise out of Ramage’s antagonism, for he had been so bitter and savage that she could not believe that he would leave things as they were.

The next morning she went out with her post-office savings bank-book, and telegraphed for a warrant to draw out all the money she had in the world.  It amounted to two-and-twenty pounds.  She addressed an envelope to Ramage, and scrawled on a half-sheet of paper, “The rest shall follow.”  The money would be available in the afternoon, and she would send him four five-pound notes.  The rest she meant to keep for her immediate necessities.  A little relieved by this step toward reinstatement, she went on to the Imperial College to forget her muddle of problems for a time, if she could, in the presence of Capes.

Part 7

For a time the biological laboratory was full of healing virtue.  Her sleepless night had left her languid but not stupefied, and for an hour or so the work distracted her altogether from her troubles.

Then, after Capes had been through her work and had gone on, it came to her that the fabric of this life of hers was doomed to almost immediate collapse; that in a little while these studies would cease, and perhaps she would never set eyes on him again.  After that consolations fled.

The overnight nervous strain began to tell; she became inattentive to the work before her, and it did not get on.  She felt sleepy and unusually irritable.  She lunched at a creamery in Great Portland Street, and as the day was full of wintry sunshine, spent the rest of the lunch-hour in a drowsy gloom, which she imagined to be thought upon the problems of her position, on a seat in Regent’s Park.  A girl of fifteen or sixteen gave her a handbill that she regarded as a tract until she saw “Votes for Women” at the top.  That turned her mind to the more generalized aspects of her perplexities again.  She had never been so disposed to agree that the position of women in the modern world is intolerable.