"And will you lead the sort of life that man has made women live? Is that fit for you? You can see what it would do to you. You would get like what he's like. You would come down to his level. First you'd share his lies and his intrigues, perforce, while you hated them. Gradually you'd get to hate them less and less: they'd become normal, habitual, easy; they'd become natural. At last you'd see little harm in them. The only harm or hurt at last would be discovery, and you'd get cunning in avoiding that. Think of you and me living that life--aye, till each of us loathed the other as well as loathing ourselves. Is that what you mean?" "Not that, anyhow not that," she said in a low voice, her eyes wide open and fixed questioningly on him. "If not that and not the other, what then? Am I to go away?" But he put Caylesham's alternative in no sincerity. He put it to her only that she might thrust it away. If she did not, he would spurn it himself. "And where should I go? Back to where I came from--back to that life?" She could not tell him to go away, nor to go back to that life. She sat silent, picturing what his life and what her own life would be through all the years, the lifelong years, when even the boy's love would be bitterness, and she could have a friend in nobody because of the great sad secret which would govern all her life. "I can't tell you. I can't decide to-day." Again and again she had told him that, fighting against the final and the irrevocable. But Blake was urgent now, wrought up to an effort, very full of his theories and his aspirations, full too of a rude natural impatience which he called by many alien names, deceiving his very soul that he might have his heart's desire, and have it without let or hindrance. He launched his last argument, a last cruel argument, whose cruelty seemed justice to a mind absorbed in its own selfishness. But she had eyes for no form of selfishness save Grantley's. To ask all did not seem selfishness to her; it was asking nothing or too little that she banned. "You've gone too far," he told her. "You can't turn back now. Look what you've done to me since you came into my life. Think what you've taught me to hope and believe--how you've let me count on you. You've no right to think of the difficulties or the distress now. You ought to have thought of all that long ago." It was true, terribly true, that she ought to have thought of all that before. Was it true that she had lost the right to arrest her steps and the power to turn back? "You're committed to it. You're bound by more than honour, by more than love. You'll be untrue to everybody in turn if you falter now." It was a clever plea to urge on a distracted mind. Where decision is too difficult, there lies desperate comfort in being convinced that it is already taken, that facts have shaped it, and previous actions irrevocably committed the harassed heart.