To-day the familiar handwriting brought no relief. This letter must be the final explanation. She opened it, standing by the hall table. "Dear Miss Henderson--you are very persistent." She folded the letter up and walked rapidly out into the sunshine. The way down to the Euston Road was very long and sunlit. It was radiant with all the months and weeks and days. She thought of going on with the unread letter and carrying it into the surgery, tearing it up into the waste paper basket and saying I have not read this. It is all right. We will not talk any more. One thing would have gone. But there would be a tremendous cheerfulness and independence and the memory of the things in the other letters. The letter once read two things would have gone, everything. She paused at the corner of the gardens looking down at the pavement. There was in some way that would not come quite clear so much more at stake than personal feelings about the insulting moment. It was something that stuck into everything, made everything intolerable until it was admitted and cancelled. As long as he went on hedging and pretending it was not there there could be no truth anywhere. It was something that must go out of the world, no matter what it cost. It would be smiling and cattish and behaving to drop it. Explained, it would be wiped away, and everything else with it. To accept his assertions would be to admit lack of insight. That would be treachery. The continued spontaneity of manner which it would ensure would be the false spontaneity that sat everywhere ... all over that woman getting into the 'bus; brisk cheerful falsity. She glanced through to the end of the letter ... "foolish gossip which might end by making your position untenable." _Idiot._ Charming chivalrous gentleman. * * * * * I want to have it both ways. To keep the consideration and flout the necessity for it. No one shall dare to protect me from gossip. To prove myself independent and truth-demanding I would break up anything. That's damned folly. Never mind. Why didn't he admit it at once? He hated being questioned and challenged. He may have thought that manner was "the kindest way." It is not for him to choose ways of treating me. This cancels the past. But it admits it. Not to admit the past would be to go on for ever in a false position. He still hides. But he knows that I know he is hiding. Where we have been we have been. It may have been through a false estimate of me to begin with. That does not matter. Where we have been we have been. That is not imagination. One day he will know it is not imagination. There is something that is making me very glad. A painful relief. Something forcing me back upon something. There is something that I have smashed, for some reason I do not know. It's something in my temper, that flares out about things. Life allows no chance of getting at the bottom of things.... 2