iselle would say.

She had got, somehow, to feel that impulse was wrong. It ranked with
disobedience. It partook of the nature of sin. People who did wicked
things did them on impulse, and were sorry ever after; but then it was
too late.

As she grew older, she added something to that. Impulses of the mind led
to impulses of the body, and impulse was wrong. Passion was an impulse
of the body. Therefore it was sin. It was the one sin one could not talk
about, so one was never quite clear about it. However, one thing seemed
beyond dispute; it was predominatingly a masculine wickedness. Good
women were beyond and above it, its victims sometimes, like those girls
at the camp, or its toys, like the sodden creatures in the segregated
district who hung, smiling their tragic smiles, around their doorways in
the late afternoons.

But good women were not like that. If they were, then they were not
good. They did not lie awake remembering the savage clasp of a man's
arms, knowing all the time that this was not love, but something quite
different. Or if it was love, that it was painful and certainly not
beautiful.

Sometimes she thought about Willy Cameron. He had had very exalted ideas
about love. He used to be rather oratorical about it.

"It's the fundamental principle of the universe," he would say, waving
his pipe wildly. "But it means suffering, dear child. It feeds on
martyrdom and fattens on sacrifice. And as the h.c. of l. doesn't affect
either commodity, it lives forever."

"What does it do, Willy, if it hasn't any martyrdom and sacrifice to
feed on? Do you mean to say that when it is returned and everybody is
happy, it dies?"

"Practically," he had said. "It then becomes domestic contentment, and
expresses itself in the shape of butcher's bills and roast chicken on
Sundays."

But that had been in the old care-free days, before Willy had thought he
loved her, and before she had met Louis.

She made a desperate effort one day to talk to her mother. She wanted,
somehow, to be set right in her own eyes. But Grace could not meet her
even half way; she did not know anything about different sorts of love,
but she did know that love was beautiful, if you met the right man and
married him. But it had to be some one who was your sort, because in the
end marriage was only a sort of glorified companionship.

The moral in that, so obviously pointed at Louis Akers, invalidated the
rest of it for Lily.

She was in a stat