"Then of course there was Lily," she said to herself. "How can I possibly excuse my treatment of Lily, or not so much my treatment of her as my attitude toward her? I suppose all this introspection is morbid, but having been brought up sharp like this and having been planked down on this bed of interminable sickness, who wouldn't be morbid? It's better to have it out with myself now, lest when I emerge from here--for incredible as it seems just at present I certainly shall emerge one fine morning--I start being introspective instead of getting down to the hard facts of earning a living and finding my way back to England. Lily!" she went on. "I believe really when I look back at it that I took a cruel delight in watching Lily's fading. It seemed jolly and cynical to predestine her to maculation, to regard her as a flower, an almost inanimate thing that could only be displayed by somebody else and was incapable of developing herself. Yet in the end she did develop herself. I was very ill then; but when I was in the clinic at Rio I had none of the sensations that I have now. What sensations did I have, then? Mostly, I believe, they were worries about Lily because she did not come to see me. Strange that something so essentially insignificant as Lily could have created such a catastrophe for Michael, and that I, when she went her own way, let her drop as easily as a piece of paper from a carriage. The fact was that, having smirched myself and survived the smirching, I was unable to fret myself very much over Lily's smirching. And yet I did fret myself in a queer, irrational way. But what use to continue? I behaved badly to Lily, and I can't excuse my attitude toward her by saying that I behaved badly to myself also." The longer Sylvia went on with the reconstruction of the past the more deeply did she feel that she was to blame for everything in it. "I'm so sorry, Sister; I was talking to myself. I think I must really be very much better to-day." The nun hastened to her bedside and asked her what she wanted. "And yet I had the impudence to resent Arthur's treatment of me," she cried. The nun shook her forefinger at Sylvia and retired again to her table at the end of the ward.