And she fell into a reverie,--eagerly constructive--wherein Maumsey became, at a stroke, a House Beautiful, at once modern and aesthetically right, a dim harmony in lovely purples, blues and greens, with the few fine things it possessed properly spaced and grouped, the old gardens showing through the latticed windows, and golden or silvery lights, like those in a Blanche interior, gleaming in its now dreary rooms. Then at a bound she sprang out of bed, and stood upright in the autumn dawn. "I hate myself!" she said fiercely--as she ran her hands through the mass of her dark hair, and threw it back upon her shoulders. Hurrying across the room in her night-gown, she threw back the curtains. A light autumnal mist, through which the sun was smiling, lay on the garden. Stately trees rose above it, and masses of flowers shewed vaguely bright; while through the blue distances beyond, the New Forest stretched to the sea. But Delia was looking at herself, in a long pier-glass that represented almost the only concession to the typical feminine needs in the room. She was not admiring her own seemliness; far from it; she was rating and despising herself for a feather-brained waverer and good-for-nothing. "Oh yes, you can _talk_!" she said, to the figure in the glass--"you are good enough at that! But what are you going to _do_!--Spend your time at Maple's and Waring--matching chintzes and curtains?--when you've _promised_--you've _promised_! Gertrude's right. There _are_ all sorts of disgusting cowardices and weaknesses in you! Oh! yes, you'd like to go fiddling and fussing down here--playing the heiress--patronising the poor people--putting yourself into beautiful clothes--and getting heaps of money out of Mr. Winnington to spend. It's in you--it's just in you--to throw everything over--to forget everything you've felt, and everything you've vowed--and just _wallow_ in luxury and selfishness and snobbery! Gertrude's absolutely right. But you shan't do it! You shan't put a hand to it! Why did that man take the guardianship? Now it's his business. He may see to it! But _you_--you have something else to do!" And she stood erect, the angry impulse in her stiffening all her young body. And through her memory there ran, swift-footed, fragments from a rhetoric of which she was already fatally mistress, the formulae too of those sincere and goading beliefs on which her youth had been fed ever since her first acquaintance with Gertrude Marvell. The mind renewed them like vows; clung to them, embraced them.