“There’s no pride, there’s no question of yourself--sometimes I think there’s no honor, with a girl who feels for a man as I do for him. I know him now, all about him. I know in my heart that he’s what you say. I think sometimes, deep down under everything, I have a feeling for him that is almost contempt. But I’m his while he’s alive and I am. I can’t any more change that than I can make myself taller or shorter. If I’d known in the beginning what I do now it would have all been different. It’s too late now to ask me where my pride is, and why I don’t tear myself free from such a bondage. It’s spoiled my life. It’s broken my heart. Sometimes I wish Jerry was dead, because then I know I’d be myself again.” He looked at her horrified. Pallid and shrunken in her rich clothes, eaten into by the passion that now, for the first time, he heard her confess, it seemed to him that she could not be the girl he had met at Foleys three and a half years ago. To his strong, self-denying nature, her weakness was terrible. He did not know that that weakness was one of the attributes which made her so lovable. “I dare say there’s something bad about me,” she went on. “I can see that other people don’t feel this way. I know Rosamund wouldn’t. If Lionel had not really cared for her and asked her to marry him she would have gone to work and just uprooted him from her mind like a weed in a garden. She wouldn’t have let things that weren’t right get such a hold on her. But I--I never tried to stop it. And now the weed’s choked out everything else in the garden.” “Don’t let it choke out everything. Root it up! Tear it out! Don’t be conquered by a weed, June.” “Oh, Uncle Jim,” she almost groaned with the eternal cry of the self-indulgent and weak, “if only I had stopped it in the beginning! I wouldn’t have grown to love him so if I’d known. It’s been such useless suffering. Nobody’s gained anything by it. It’s all been such a waste!” There was a silence. The Colonel sat looking down with his heart feeling heavy as a stone. When he came against that wall of acquiescent feminine feebleness, he felt that he could say nothing. She stirred in her chair and said, her voice suddenly low, her words coming slowly: “They’re to be married in January. It’s going to be a short engagement. Black Dan’s going to give them a house down here with everything new and beautiful. I’ll see them all the time, everywhere. I know just the way they’ll look, smiling into each other’s eyes.” She stopped and then sat up with a rustling of crushed silks. “How do people bear these things? I haven’t hurt anybody or done any harm to have to suffer this way. When I’m alone I keep thinking of them--how happy they are together, not caring for anything in the world but each other. I think of him kissing her. I think that some day they’ll have a baby--” her voice trailed away hoarsely and she sank back in the chair, her head on her breast.