And through her memory there ran in an ugly dance those things, those monstrous things, he had said to her about the Scotch woman. It was not at all absolutely sure that she, Hester, was his wife. He had shown her those letters at St. Germains, of course, to reassure her; and the letters were perfectly genuine letters, written by the people they professed to be written by. Still Scotch marriage law was a damned business--one never knew. He _hoped_ it was all right; but if she did hate him as poisonously as she said, if she did really want to get rid of him, he might perhaps be able to assist her. Had he after all tricked and ruined her? Yet as her consciousness framed the question in the conventional phrases familiar to her through newspapers and novels, she hardly knew what they meant, this child of eighteen, who in three short weeks had been thrust through the fire of an experience on which she had never had time to reflect. Flattered vanity, and excitement, leading up almost from the first day to instinctive and fierce revolt--intervals of acquiescence, of wild determination to be happy, drowned in fresh rebellions of soul and sense--through these alternations the hours had rushed on, culminating in her furtive and sudden escape from the man of whom she was now in mad fear--her blind flight for "home." The _commonness_ of her case, the absence of any romantic or poetic element in it--it was that which galled, which degraded her in her own eyes. Only three weeks since she had felt that entire and arrogant belief in herself, in her power over her own life and Philip's, on which she now looked back as merely ludicrous!--inexplicable in a girl of the most ordinary intelligence. What power had girls over men?--such men as Philip Meryon? Her vanity was bleeding to death--and her life with it. Since the revelation of her birth, she seemed to have been blindly struggling to regain her own footing in the world--the kind of footing she was determined to have. Power and excitement; _not_ to be pitied, but to be followed, wooed, adored; not to be forced on the second and third bests of the world, but to have the "chief seat," the daintest morsel, the _beau role_ always--had not this been her instinctive, unvarying demand on life? And now? If she were indeed married, she was tied to a man who neither loved her, nor could bring her any position in the world; who was penniless, and had only entrapped her that he might thereby get some money out of her relations; who, living or dead, would be a disgrace to her, standing irrevocably between her and any kind of honour or importance in society.