d courage in that
way. With but little in her education or scope of life to feed it, her
brain was active and inquiring. It worked on all matters that came
within her ken, and she never shirked a question. She was affectionate,
loyal, and naturally light-hearted, but she was critical too, of herself
no less than of others. It would have been easy for her, if she had had
less character, to put away from her, as she had done for the last five
years, the consideration of her relationship to Jim, to have ignored his
approach to her, since she had stopped him from coming closer, and to
have deferred searching her own mind until he should have approached her
again and in such a way that she could no longer have avoided it. But
she had locked up the remembrance of the happenings of five years before
in a cupboard of her brain, and locked the key on it. If she had thought
of it at all, she would have had to think of herself as having made a
present to Jim which he had returned to her. And because she could not
altogether escape from the memory of it, she had come to look upon
herself as a rather foolish and very immature young person in those
days, who had not in the least known what she was about when she allowed
herself to be made love to.

With regard to Jim her thoughts had been even less definite. His
attitude to her had been so entirely brotherly that she had never felt
the necessity of asking herself whether he was still keeping his
expressed love for her alive, although he would not show it, or whether
he, too, thought of their love-making as a piece of rather childish
folly, and had put it completely behind him. Beyond the first slight
awkwardness of meeting him when he came back from Oxford after his
letter to her, she had felt none in his presence, and until this very
morning her attitude towards him had been frank and her feelings
affectionate. He had made that possible by showing the same attitude and
apparently the same feelings.

But what she now had to consider was whether he had actually been so
frank towards her as she to him; whether he had not been keeping
something back, and, in effect, playing a part. If it were so, their
relationship was not as she had thought it, and would have to be
adjusted.

She turned her mind to this point first. It would really be rather
surprising if Jim had been in love with her all this time and she had
not known it. She thought she must have known if it were so, and she
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