‘I have done neither. What is the use of my speaking, or of your speaking, unless you want my father to separate us for ever? Do you think that he will be civil to you when he knows that I love you? Do you think he would let me marry the man I love? No, that would be showing me too much kindness. If we lived in the good old fairy tale days he would send out a herald to invite the ugliest and most hateful men in the kingdom to come and compete for his daughter’s hand, and the ugliest and vilest should have the prize. That’s how my father would treat me if the age we live in would allow him, and as he can’t do quite so much as that, he will wait quietly till some detestable person comes in his way, and then order me to marry him.’ ‘Beatrix, do you think it is right and just to talk like this?’ ‘I can’t pronounce upon the rightness of it, but I know it is not unjust. I am saying nothing but the truth. Ah, Cyril, I may seem wicked and bitter and unwomanly when I talk like this; yes, I am all those bad things--a woman unworthy to be loved by you, except that I am so much to be pitied. But who has made me what I am? If you knew how I used to try to make my father love me! If you could have seen me when I was a little thin sickly child creeping into his study and crouching at his knee, to be repulsed just a little more harshly than he would have sent away a dog! I went on trying against every discouragement. Who else was there for me to love?--who else was there to love me? My mother was gone; my governess told me that it was natural for a father to love his child--an only child--a motherless child most of all. So I went on trying. And I think the more I tried to win his love the more hateful I became to him. And now, though we meet two or three times a day and speak civilly to each other, we live quite apart. When he was dangerously ill last winter, I used to sit in the corridor outside his bedroom day and night, fearing that he was going to die, and thinking that perhaps at the last he might relent, and remember that I was his daughter, and stretch out his feeble arms to me and take me to his heart. But though death came very near him--awfully near--there was no relenting.’ ‘My darling, life has been very hard for you,’ said Cyril, with deepest pity. She shocked him by her vehemence--but she moved him to compassion by the depth of bygone misery her present indignation revealed. ‘My father has been hard to me, and he has hardened me,’ she said. ‘He turned my heart to stone. It was cold and hard as stone, Cyril, till you melted it.’