“I was very romantic, fearfully emotional, and the soul of honour. Beatrice said nobody cared a thing about her. FitzHerbert was always jaunting off, the mother was a fretful invalid. So I was seventeen, earning half a guinea a week, and she was eighteen, with no money, when we ran away to Brighton and got married. Poor old Pater, he took it awfully well, I have been a frightful drag on him, you know. “There’s the romance. I wonder how it will all end.” Helena laughed, and he did not detect her extreme bitterness of spirit. They walked on in silence for some time. He was thinking back, before Helena’s day. This left her very much alone, and forced on her the idea that, after all, love, which she chose to consider as single and wonderful a thing in a man’s life as birth, or adolescence, or death, was temporary, and formed only an episode. It was her hour of disillusion. “Come to think of it,” Siegmund continued, “I have always shirked. Whenever I’ve been in a tight corner I’ve gone to Pater.” “I think,” she said, “marriage has been a tight corner you couldn’t get out of to go to anybody.” “Yet I’m here,” he answered simply. The blood suffused her face and neck. “And some men would have made a better job of it. When it’s come to sticking out against Beatrice, and sailing the domestic ship in spite of her, I’ve always funked. I tell you I’m something of a moral coward.” He had her so much on edge she was inclined to answer, “So be it.” Instead, she ran back over her own history: it consisted of petty discords in contemptible surroundings, then of her dreams and fancies, finally—Siegmund. “In my life,” she said, with the fine, grating discord in her tones, “I might say _always_, the real life has seemed just outside—brownies running and fairies peeping—just beyond the common, ugly place where I am. I seem to have been hedged in by vulgar circumstances, able to glimpse outside now and then, and see the reality.” “You are so hard to get at,” said Siegmund. “And so scornful of familiar things.” She smiled, knowing he did not understand. The heat had jaded her, so that physically she was full of discord, of dreariness that set her teeth on edge. Body and soul, she was out of tune. A warm, noiseless twilight was gathering over the downs and rising darkly from the sea. Fate, with wide wings, was hovering just over her. Fate, ashen grey and black, like a carrion crow, had her in its shadow. Yet Siegmund took no notice. He did not understand. He walked beside her whistling to himself, which only distressed her the more. They were alone on the smooth hills to the east. Helena looked at the day melting out of the sky, leaving the permanent structure of the night. It was her turn to suffer the sickening detachment which comes after moments of intense living.