The news confirmed what Sally had never consciously thought, but what she now felt she had known for days. If anything had been needed to complete her despair it was this. She felt suicidal. She could have borne illness, even failure in the business, even all the complications of distress which she had been already experiencing; but the knowledge of ultimate disgrace so inevitable drove her mad. Vainly Sally's mind flew in every direction for relief--the doctor might be wrong; the coming of babies could be prevented; perhaps Gaga might never know--she could persuade him to go away, could go away herself, could do a hundred things to tide over the difficulty. And at the end of all these twistings of the mind she would find herself still terribly in danger, and would fight against hideous screaming fits by lying on the floor or on a couch and crushing her handkerchief into her mouth. She was quite overcome by her new disaster, the fruit of wild temptation, and the consequence of her whole course of action. Used as Sally was to meeting every emergency with cool shrewdness, she could not bring to her present situation the necessary philosophy, because she was ill, and fear-stricken, and made crazy by the impossibility of finding a solution to her anxieties. Hour after hour was spent with horrible nightmarish imaginings, in frenzied self-excuses and improvised expedients. And never did there come one moment of peace in the midst of all this panic. Sally had no friend. More and more she began to realise this. She had no friend. She had made use of people, they were fond of her, would submit to her; but she had no friend. More than anything in the world she now needed a friend. There was nobody in whom she could confide, from whose love and sympathy she could draw the strength which at this point she so greatly needed. She had a husband, a lover, a mother--to none of these could she go with the truth. It needed all Sally's egotism to make the truth seem capable of justification, or indeed to make it seem even credible, so different is the standard by which we judge our own actions from that which we apply to others. Sally saw everything so much in relation to all that she had ever thought and felt that she could not understand how her impulses might horrify one coming to them only after translation into action. She only knew that she could not betray herself unreservedly to anybody with the hope of being found innocent. The knowledge made her at first full of terror; and the terror and the successive elaborate self-explanation, given to an unresponsive silence which she could easily suppose to be hostile, made her obstinate; then she became the more passionately afraid. She could have stormed, lied, wriggled; but she could never hope to escape the consequences that she dreaded.