What did it matter whom she married? The general scheme of the universe
would not be interfered with because she was about to do the thing that
was most abhorrent to her of all acts done by women--this act being,
by the way, the one which she was most earnest to do only six months
before!
She was able, without the shedding of a tear, to sit down to her
escritoire and write a letter to Pierce, letting him know the
determination to which she had come, and admitting to him that she had
behaved basely--cruelly--inconsiderately. She had been bound to Mr.
Clifton--and she knew it--at the very moment that she had acknowledged
to the man to whom she was writing that she loved him. She admitted how
culpably weak she had been--and still was, but she thought that she was
strong enough to see that the best way--the only way--of sparing the
one who was dearest to her much misery--the only way of escaping from a
hopeless position was by submitting to Fate. If he would think over the
matter he would, she was sure, see that she was right, and thinking over
it all he could not but be thankful that he was saved from a wretched
woman who did not know her own mind two days together and who had no
sense of honour or truth or fidelity.
That was the substance of the letter which she felt great satisfaction
in writing to Pierce Winwood; and she sincerely believed that she
was all that she announced herself to be, though she would have been
terribly disappointed if she had thought that she would succeed in
convincing him that she was unworthy to be loved by him.
She felt greatly relieved on writing this letter embodying as it did
so frank a confession of her weakness and--incidentally--of her
womanliness, and she was able to dance nine dances and to partake of a
very _recherche_ supper in the course of the night. She felt that she
had become thoroughly worldly, taking a pleasure in the whirl and the
glow and the glitter of all. There was no chance of her being led to
think about what lay heavy on her heart while she was giving herself up
to this form of intoxication. Every dance had the effect of a dram of
green Chartreuse upon her, and the result of her night’s festivity was
to make her feel, she thought, that the world was very well adapted as a
place of residence for men and women; and as for the worldliness--well,
worldliness was one of the pleasantest elements in the world of men and
women.
Having come to so satisfactory a conclusion, it was somewhat remarkable,
she thought, that, on finding her father drinking his glass of
Apollinaris in his study--he had just returned from the House--she
should go straight up to him, after shutting the door, and say, “I wish
to say to you that I do not wish to marry Ernest Clifton, because I love
quite another man.”
He looked at her curiously for a few moments, then he said, laying down
his tumbler: