But the terrible thing about those last weeks had been that, although she knew exactly what he was thinking, they had simply avoided all open and direct discussion. She had wished for it, but what could she say? Only the same things again—that it would be all right when they were married, that he would love the family then, that she would be _his_ then and not the _family’s_.... Always at this point in her argument she was pulled up sharply, because that was a lie. She would not be _his_ when they were married. She knew now, quite definitely, that her mother was utterly, absolutely resolved never to let her go. And meanwhile there was Anna.... Katherine, putting Philip aside for a moment, thought of the members of the family one by one. They were all separated from her. She summoned this ghostly truth before her, there in her dim room with the hot scented air surrounding her, quite calmly without a shudder or a qualm. Her mother was separated from her because, during the last six months, they had never, with one exception, spoken the truth to one another. Aunt Aggie was separated from her because, quite definitely, ever since that horrible Sunday night, she hated Aunt Aggie. Henry was separated from her because during these last months he had been so strange with his alternate moods of affection and abrupt rudeness that she now deliberately avoided him. Aunt Betty was separated from her because she simply didn’t see things in the least as they were. Her father was separated from her because he laughed at the situation and refused to consider it at all. Millie—ah! Millie, the friend of all her life!—was separated from her because they were concealing things the one from the other as they had never done in all their days before. Katherine faced these facts. She had an illusion about her life that she had always been right in the very heart of her family. She did not know that it had been their need of her that had put her there, and that now that she was turning away from them to someone else, they were all rejecting her. They also were unaware of this. They thought and she thought that it had been always a matter of Love between them all—but of course Love in most cases is only a handsome name for selfishness. So Katherine sat alone in her room and waited for the thunder to come. Meanwhile she was immensely surprised that this discovery of her loneliness did not immediately depress her, but rather aroused in her a pugnacity and an independence that seemed to her to be quite new qualities. And then, following immediately upon her pugnacity, came an overwhelming desire to kiss them all, to do anything in the world that they wished, to love them all more than she had ever done before. And following upon that came an aching, aching desire for Philip, for his presence, his eyes, his hair, his neck, his hands, his voice....