Nevertheless, even before that date, had her deeper feelings been questioned she would have reacted with the idea that sexual incontinence was extremely ugly and chastity to be prized in the egg and spoon race that life was. She had been brought up by her father--who, perhaps, was wiser than appeared on the surface--to admire athleticism, and she was aware that proficiency of the body calls for chastity, sobriety, cleanliness and the various qualities that group themselves under the heading of abnegation. She couldn't have lived amongst the Ealing servant-class--the eldest son of the house in which she had been employed bad been the defendant in a peculiarly scabrous breach of promise case, and the comments of the drunken cook on this and similar affairs had run the whole gamut from the sentimentally reticent to the extreme of coarseness according to the state of her alcoholic barometer--she couldn't then have lived among the Ealing servant-class and come to any other subliminal conclusion. So that, dividing the world into bright beings on the one hand and, on the other, into the mere stuff to fill graveyards whose actions during life couldn't matter, she had considered that the bright beings must be people whose public advocating of enlightened promiscuity went along with an absolute continence. She was aware that enlightened beings occasionally fell away from these standards in order to become portentous Egerias; but the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Mrs. Taylors, and the George Eliots of the last century she had regarded humorously as rather priggish nuisances. Indeed, being very healthy and very hard worked, she had been in the habit of regarding the whole matter, if not humorously, then at least good-humouredly, as a nuisance. But being brought right up against the sexual necessities of a first-class Egeria had been for her a horrible affair. For Mrs. Duchemin had revealed the fact that her circumspect, continent and suavely æsthetic personality was doubled by another at least as coarse as, and infinitely more incisive in expression than, that of the drunken cook. The language that she had used about her lover--calling him always "that oaf" or "that beast"!--had seemed literally to pain the girl internally, as if it had caused so many fallings away of internal supports at each two or three words. She had hardly been able to walk home through the darkness from the rectory.