Joan looked at her in amazement. This was Milly, beside whom she had slept for years; this was her sister, talking like some abandoned woman, quite without shame, glorying in her lapse. This was the real Milly; all the others had been unreal, this was the natural Milly. Something in her own thoughts made her pause. Natural, yes, natural. This was Milly upholding the nature she had inherited, fighting for its pleasures, its gratifications; Milly was only being natural, being herself. Were other people like that when they were themselves? Was that why a housemaid they had had years ago had left because she was going to have a baby? Had she, too, been just natural? And what was being natural? Was it being like Milly, or like the housemaid with her sin great and heavy within her? What gave people these impulses which they would not or could not resist? Was it nature working on them for her own ends? Milly and the housemaid, she coupled them together in her mind. They were both human beings and what they had done was very human, too; very pitiful and sordid, like most human happenings. She looked at her sister where she stood half dressed, her head drooping a little now, her cheeks flushed. She was so thin. It was touching the way her thin arms hung down from the short sleeves of her vest; they were like young twigs waiting to complete their growth. Seen like this there was so little of Milly to upbraid, she looked so childish. Yet she was not childish; she was wiser than Joan, she had probed into some secret. How funny! "Come here," Joan said unsteadily; "come here to me, Milly." Milly went to her, hiding her head on her shoulder. She began to cry. "Joan, listen, I didn't mean half I said just now, all the beastly, coarse things, I didn't mean any of them I know it's wrong, it's awful--and I've been so horribly ashamed--only I couldn't help it. I just couldn't help it!" Joan thought quickly; she knew instinctively that her moment had come. It was now or never with Milly. "Do you want to marry him?" she asked quietly. Milly looked up, a little smile trembling over her tear-stained face. "Of course not," she said. "Would you want to marry Jack?" "Well, then, look here; do you still want to go to the Royal College, or have you lost all interest in your fiddle?" "Lost interest? Why, I want it more than anything on earth; you know I do." "Right!" said Joan; "then you shall go. I'll speak to Mother to-morrow." CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX 1 "IT'S no good, Mother," said Joan firmly. "Things like this can happen, they do happen; it's human nature, I suppose." "It's not my idea of _human_ nature," Mrs. Ogden replied in a trembling voice. "Well, in any case it seems to have been Milly's nature, and the point is now that she ought to be sent to London."