She flung off her furs and muff on to the floor. Her feet were wet, despite goloshes. She removed her shoes and put on slippers. Then, as if impelled by a sense of duty, she picked up the furs and muff and carried them to the piano, laying them on the closed sound-board.... She was just tired, physically, mentally and spiritually.... Even _she_ had realized the awful selfishness of her soul. It was that which was hurting her far more than she knew. She could not quite analyse her feelings. But Verreker’s attitude had made her terribly conscious of her own inferiority. It hurt her to think that he despised her. Her soul was rotten, there was no health in her.... There was a sense in which Verreker’s engagement to Helen gave her a ray of spiritual hope, even if it subjected her to fierce pangs of jealousy. If he were in love with Helen and not with herself, that would sufficiently explain his casualness towards her. And he could not, presumably, help being in love with Helen.... Being in love with Helen did not necessarily indicate that he despised _her_. She suddenly realized that if she were convinced that he despised her all the hope would vanish out of her life. His conviction of her unworthiness would prove to her finally that her life was not, in the truest sense, worth living. That he was not in love with her was a deep disappointment, a bitter blow, beyond all doubt, but it was at most an accident. But that he deliberately and calculatingly pierced the selfishness and baseness of her, and despised her utterly from the depths of his being, she could not bear to think of.... Fiercely she turned upon her inmost nature and examined it ruthlessly. The spectacle was appalling. Her soul was eaten up with selfishness and jealousy and conceit. Everything in her past life had been inspired by one or other of these three leading motives. One or other of them was the clue to nearly everything she had ever done, to nearly every attitude she had ever adopted, to nearly every relationship that had ever entered her life. Her escape from home, her episodes of friendship with George Trant, all were evidences of her love of self. Her past was strewn with the wreckage of things that could not live in the atmosphere of her own spiritual avarice. And now her friendship with Verreker had broken under the strain placed upon it. If he were in love with Helen really and truly she could bear it. But if she thought that he saw in her own soul all the rottenness that she could see, the impulse to kill herself would be overmastering. Her father had committed suicide....