n a
particularly hard wooden chair in the vicar's study every nerve in her
body was on edge.

It was a year after Vincent's death. With lapse of time that event had
lost much of its oppressive magnificence, and it affected Audrey more in
looking back than it had done in reality. Time, too, had thrown her
relations with Wyndham into relief; and as she realised more and more
their true nature, the conscience that had been so long quiescent began
to stir in her. Its voice seemed to be seconding Wyndham's and
Katherine's verdict. She became uneasy about herself. Once more, this
time in serious sincerity, she felt the need of a stronger personality
upholding and pervading her own. Absolute dependence on somebody else's
character had become a habit of her nature: she could no more live now
without some burning stimulus to thought and feeling than the drunkard
can satisfy his thirst with plain water. Naturally she thought of Mr.
Flaxman Reed, as Katherine had thought of him the midnight before
Vincent's death, or as she had thought of him herself in the day of her
temptation. This time she had ended by going to him, as many a woman had
gone before, with her empty life in her hands, begging that it might be
filled. For all cases of the kind Mr. Flaxman Reed had one remedy--work
in the parish of St. Teresa's; as a rule it either killed or cured them.
But he had spared Audrey hitherto, as he would have spared some sick
child a medicine too strong and bitter for it. Finally, much to his
surprise, she asked him for the work of her own accord, and he gave it
to her.

And now she had had three days of it. It was enough. It made her head
ache yet to think of all she had gone through. For the first two days
she had been sustained by a new and wholly delightful sensation, the
consciousness of her own goodness; on the third day that support had
suddenly given way. A woman's coarse word, the way a man had looked at
her as she lifted her silk petticoats out of the mud, some bit of crude
criticism such as Demos publishes at street corners in the expressive
vernacular, had been sufficient to destroy all the bright illusions that
gilded the gutters of Lambeth--reflections of a day that was not hers.
And yet, she had come into a new world with new ideas and new emotions;
if not the best of all possible worlds, it was better than any which had
once seemed probable, and she wanted to stay in it. She was dazzled by
the splendour of religion. Th