been treated exactly like any
little ignorant servant girl waiting at a street corner for her young
man: just such a one as her aunts and her mother had been; and yet she
felt violently that she was different. In the middle of the night she
woke to find herself muttering: "I aren't going to stand it! I aren't
going to stand it!" Then she bit the sheet to prevent herself from
breaking out into a storm of weeping. She loved him so, but was no
longer certain of his love. She could give him up almost gladly if he
loved her and would always love her--but this was more than she could
bear. There seemed to her no paradox in that--it was just what she
felt.

Then she saw his heavily cut face on the darkness, as he had looked
when he walked past her with that other man--both of them solid,
self-contained, out of her reach! And with that the cold wave of anger
swept over her again, overwhelming her. "I can't stand it! I aren't
going to stand it. He'd no right to treat me like that, as if I were
dirt beneath his feet. I'm as good as he is."

So the conflicting thoughts went on during the night hours; all the
doubts and feelings which she had inherited, or had imbibed from the
Creddles, warring with her own independence and pride. A girl like
herself was good enough for any man. He'd no right to insult her by
passing her like that in the street when they'd kissed as they did on
the cliff top. She'd given him up, but she was going to be treated
properly--not like a girl who had done something of which they were
both ashamed. And again the helpless threat: "I aren't going to stand
it!"

At last it was time to get up, and after a while to go down to the
promenade. She was by now so exhausted with emotion that she could not
feel any more and let her perceptions drift vaguely over outside
things. A bill was up on the road-side, announcing the Benefit Concert
for the band for that evening; another advertised second-hand tents and
folding chairs for sale, cheap. A girl told her about a tent that had
blown down the day of the gale, revealing a fat lady in a bathing
towel--behaviour of rude Boreas which seemed to have put an end to
bathing from tents for the season. Then a man came down the road with
a barrow, crying, "Meller pears! Fine meller pe-a-a-rs!" Caroline
bought some to take to Aunt Creddle, though she had had no definite
thought of going there when she started ten minutes earlier than usual,
but the ache