The crudity of the question, the awful conceit of replying in the affirmative, drove her to subterfuge. “Not exactly that, perhaps,” she told herself. “At least, how can I tell? I shall have to wait and see. I can’t give a direct answer.” Yet if she had been forced to give a direct answer, there is no doubt what it would have been. And now, disillusioned, humiliated, self-scornful, the preposterous nature of her ambitions forced itself upon her. For the space of half an hour she was perfectly frank with herself. She did not spare that pitiable self-conceit of hers. She was ruthless. It was as if she thought that if she could wound that self-conceit so that it died of its injuries, so much the better. She employed first of all the cold steel of logic. The facts were these. She had been told frankly that she was not a genius. She was hurt and humiliated. Ergo, she must have been cherishing the notion that she was a genius. Absurd creature! Preposterous egoist! Conceited upstart! And all because she had played at a third-rate concert! She wound up with a bitter piece of advice. You aren’t a genius, she insisted, you’re just an ordinary girl with as much extraordinariness in her as falls to the lot of most people. And the sooner you finish with your absurd dreams and ambitions and wake up to the facts the better. It was good advice. She tried conscientiously to take it. She did take it--for about five and twenty minutes. But those five and twenty minutes were among the most difficult and miserable she had ever spent. She flung herself down on the bed in the attic at No. 14, Gifford Road, and was so wretched that she could not cry. Besides, she was convinced that there was nothing she had a right to cry about. Yet it was the utter horror, the unbelievable loneliness of existence that appalled her. She was quite alone in her struggle with the world, parentless, almost friendless. She knew now why it was that she had not mourned the loss of her parents, why it was that her solitary struggle had been up to then so exhilarating, so pleasant. It was that absurd faith in herself, that fearful egoism, that terrible conceit, that had enabled her to fight on alone. And now her succour, her comfort, her support had suddenly cracked and given way, and she was left clinging to wreckage. The future was simply blank, a dull, drab hereafter of self-effacement. Life was not worth living. For the first time in all her life she felt alone--alone with the wreckage of dead dreams and shattered hopes.... “O God!” she cried, “if I’m only ordinary after all! ...”