It would mean greater pain than pleasure to her afterwards, and would certainly spoil all chance of a career. She gloried in the fact that she had had the courage to taste of life's joys for experience, but she would have burned with shame to feel that she was being drawn into an equivocal position through her own weakness. Katherine Bush was as proud as Lucifer. She fully understood--apart from moral questions which did not trouble her--that what she had done would have been fatal to a fool like Gladys, or to any girl except one with her exceptional deliberation and iron will. She truly believed that such experiments were extremely dangerous, and on no account to be adopted as a principle of action in general. The straight and narrow path of orthodox virtue was the only one for most women to follow; and the only one she would have advocated for her sisters or friends. The proof being that as a rule when women erred they invariably suffered because they had not the pluck or the strength to know when to stop. Katherine Bush was absolutely determined that she should never be hampered, in her game, by her own emotions or weakness. Before Lord Algy would return from Wales, she would have left Liv and Dev's. She had never given him her home address, and there would be no trace of her. She would look in the _Morning Post_ for information, and then endeavour to secure some post as companion or secretary to some great lady. There she would pick up the rest of the necessary equipment to make herself into a person in whom no flaws could be found. And when she had accomplished this, then fate would have opened up some path worth following. "Some day I shall be one of the greatest women in England," she told herself, as she looked unblinking into the glowing coals. Then, having settled her plans, she allowed herself to go over the whole of her little holiday, incident by incident. How utterly adorable Algy had been! She found herself thrilling again at each remembrance--How refined and how considerate! How easy were his manners; he was too sure of himself, and his welcome in life, ever to show the deplorable self-consciousness which marked the friends who came on Sundays, or the bumptious self-assertion of her brothers, Fred and Bert. If only she had been born in his world, and had by right of birth those prerogatives which she meant to obtain by might of intelligence, how good it would have been to marry him--for a few years! But even now in her moment of fierce, passionate first love, which in her case was so largely made up of the physical, her brain was too level and speculative not to balance the pros and cons of such a situation. And while she felt she loved him with all her being, she knew that he was no match for her intellectually, and that when the glamour faded he would weary her.