Since the disaster to this end of the promenade it was deserted by idle saunterers. Walking briskly, sometimes running, with elbows pressed close to her sides, Gita made directly for this solitary spot and sat down on the sands, embracing her knees and staring out at the tossing ocean. Gradually her hard spine drooped forlornly, and although she scorned tears and self-pity, her mouth relaxed into the soft and charming curves of her youth. She felt small and desolate and alone. What was a dilapidated old manor to a girl who had been deprived of a far more significant birthright? If she could have grown up in that old place, a Carteret of the Carterets, she would have been a normal innocent girl, full of hope and day-dreams and every kind of delightful nonsense. At twenty-two she had not an illusion, and a horror and hatred of life. And her mother, the one person she had ever been able to care for, the one person who had it in her power to make her feel young and human and necessary, was dead. More than once she had taken herself to task, scowled ferociously at her distorted ego. Common sense dictated that she should ignore her unfortunate experience of life as too uncommon to warp any educated woman’s viewpoint, readjust, reorient, herself. Other girls had had unfortunate experiences—but not hers. Not hers. Her earliest memory was of Paris . . . an old detached house in Passy . . . a constant uproar downstairs that kept her awake in the nursery under the roof . . . ribald laughter and singing, brawls, banging doors all over the house. . . . Sometimes she would hang over the banisters in her nightgown, shivering with cold, fretful but curious. . . . Her mother with white desperate face, running up the stairs, snatching the child, darting into the nearest room, locking the door . . . a man running after her . . . mumbling at the keyhole, cursing. . . . Gerald Carteret, later, pounding on the door, commanding her to return to his guests and not make a silly little fool of herself. . . . Her mother’s terrified sobbing, then quailing obedience lest he keep his threat and break down the door.