ving, but after the
ordinary kiss of goodnight, she came back suddenly and kissed her again;
she said nothing, but the embrace was emphatic and eloquent. It seemed
to the recipient to be forgiving also; it meant "I want you to be happy,
don't imagine I think of anything else." If Fanny kissed her like that,
it was because Fanny supposed that she had made up her mind to marry
Weston Marchmont. She was fully conscious that the inference was not a
strange one to draw from her conduct that evening. But now the mood of
impulse was entirely gone; she considered the matter in a cool spirit,
and her talk with Dick Benyon assumed unlooked-for importance in her
deliberations. To marry Marchmont was a step entirely in harmony with
the ideal which her family and the world had of her, which Marchmont
himself most thoroughly and undoubtingly believed in. If she were really
what she was supposed to be, the match would satisfy her as well as it
would everybody else. But if she were quite different in her heart? In
that case it might indeed be urged that no marriage would or could
permanently satisfy her or the whole of her nature. This was likely
enough; to see how often something of that kind happened it was,
unfortunately, only necessary to run over ten or a dozen names which
offered themselves promptly enough from the list of her acquaintance.
Still to marry knowing you would not be satisfied was to drop below the
common fate of marrying knowing that you might not be; it gave up the
golden chance; it abandoned illusion just where illusion seemed most
necessary.

Oh for life, for the movement of life! It is perhaps hard to realise how
often that cry breaks from the hearts of women. No doubt the aspiration
it expresses is rather apt to end in antics, not edifying to the
onlooker, hardly (it may be supposed) comforting to the performer. But
the antics are one thing, the aspiration another, and they have the
aspiration strongest who condemn and shun the antics. The matter may be
stated very simply, at least if the form in which it presented itself to
May Gaston in her twenty-third year be allowed to suffice. Most girls
are bred in a cage, most girls expect to escape therefrom by marriage,
most girls find that they have only walked into another cage. She had
nothing to say, so far as her own case went, against the comfort either
of the old or of the new cage; they were both indeed luxurious. But
cages they were and such she knew them to