But now she was longing for the subtle easement of confession, so dear to the soul of woman. Her self-pity was augmented by her sense of wrong-doing—she was thoroughly unstrung, almost ill with self-pity—so that lacking the courage to confess the present, she let her thoughts dwell on the past. Stephen had always forborne to question, and therefore that past had never been discussed, but now Angela felt a great need to discuss it. She did not analyse her feelings; she only knew that she longed intensely to humble herself, to plead for compassion, to wring from the queer, strong, sensitive being who loved her, some hope of ultimate forgiveness. At that moment, as she lay there in Stephen’s arms, the girl assumed an enormous importance. It was strange, but the very fact of betrayal appeared to have strengthened her will to hold her, and Angela stirred, so that Stephen said softly: ‘Lie still—I thought you were fast asleep.’ And Angela answered: ‘No, I’m not asleep, dearest, I’ve been thinking. There are some things I ought to tell you. You’ve never asked me about my past life—why haven’t you, Stephen?’ ‘Because,’ said Stephen, ‘I knew that some day you’d tell me.’ Then Angela began at the very beginning. She described a Colonial home in Virginia. A grave, grey house, with a columned entrance, and a garden that looked down on deep, running water, and that water had rather a beautiful name—it was called the Potomac River. Up the side of the house grew magnolia blossoms, and many old trees gave their shade to its garden. In summer the fire-flies lit lamps on those trees, shifting lamps that moved swiftly among the branches. And the hot summer darkness was splashed with lightning, and the hot summer air was heavy with sweetness. She described her mother who had died when Angela was twelve—a pathetic, inadequate creature; the descendant of women who had owned many slaves to minister to their most trivial requirements: ‘She could hardly put on her own stockings and shoes,’ smiled Angela, as she pictured that mother. She described her father, George Benjamin Maxwell—a charming, but quite incorrigible spendthrift. She said: ‘He lived in past glories, Stephen. Because he was a Maxwell—a Maxwell of Virginia—he wouldn’t admit that the Civil War had deprived us all of the right to spend money. God knows, there was little enough of it left—the War practically ruined the old Southern gentry! My grandma could remember those days quite well; she scraped lint from her sheets for our wounded soldiers. If Grandma had lived, my life might have been different—but she died a couple of months after Mother.’ She described the eventual cataclysm, when the home had been sold up with everything in it, and she and her father had set out for New York—she just seventeen and he broken and ailing—to rebuild his dissipated fortune. And because she was now painting a picture of real life, untinged by imagination, her words lived, and her voice grew intensely bitter.