But did many women get anything better?

This afternoon, when she was urgent to explain her hampering and tainting complication with Ramage, the realization of this alien quality in her relationship with Manning became acute.  Hitherto it had been qualified by her conception of all life as a compromise, by her new effort to be unexacting of life.  But she perceived that to tell Manning of her Ramage adventures as they had happened would be like tarring figures upon a water-color.  They were in different key, they had a different timbre.  How could she tell him what indeed already began to puzzle herself, why she had borrowed that money at all?  The plain fact was that she had grabbed a bait.  She had grabbed!  She became less and less attentive to his meditative, self-complacent fragments of talk as she told herself this.  Her secret thoughts made some hasty, half-hearted excursions into the possibility of telling the thing in romantic tones—­Ramage was as a black villain, she as a white, fantastically white, maiden....  She doubted if Manning would even listen to that.  He would refuse to listen and absolve her unshriven.

Then it came to her with a shock, as an extraordinary oversight, that she could never tell Manning about Ramage—­never.

She dismissed the idea of doing so.  But that still left the forty pounds!...

Her mind went on generalizing.  So it would always be between herself and Manning.  She saw her life before her robbed of all generous illusions, the wrappered life unwrappered forever, vistas of dull responses, crises of make-believe, years of exacting mutual disregard in a misty garden of fine sentiments.

But did any woman get anything better from a man?  Perhaps every woman conceals herself from a man perforce!...

She thought of Capes.  She could not help thinking of Capes.  Surely Capes was different.  Capes looked at one and not over one, spoke to one, treated one as a visible concrete fact.  Capes saw her, felt for her, cared for her greatly, even if he did not love her.  Anyhow, he did not sentimentalize her.  And she had been doubting since that walk in the Zoological Gardens whether, indeed, he did simply care for her.  Little things, almost impalpable, had happened to justify that doubt; something in his manner had belied his words.  Did he not look for her in the morning when she entered—­come very quickly to her?  She thought of him as she had last seen him looking down the length of the laboratory to see her go.  Why had he glanced up—­quite in that way?...

The thought of Capes flooded her being like long-veiled sunlight breaking again through clouds.  It came to her like a dear thing rediscovered, that she loved Capes.  It came to her that to marry any one but Capes was impossible.  If she could not marry him, she would not marry any one.  She would end this sham with Manning.  It ought never to have begun.  It was cheating, pitiful cheating.  And then if some day Capes wanted her—­saw fit to alter his views upon friendship....