ys been a low one; no great
harm in it, perhaps; but it had often wounded and disgusted her.

And then--for climax!--his concealment of the early love affair with
Chloe Fairmile; his weakness and folly in letting her regain her hold
upon him; his behaviour at the Brendon ball, the gossip which, as Agnes
Farmer declared, was all over the neighbourhood, ending in the last
baseness--the assignation, the lies, the hypocrisy of the afternoon!

Enough!--more than enough! What did she care what the English world
thought of her? She would free and right herself in her own way, and
they might hold up what hands they pleased. A passion of wounded vanity,
of disappointed self-love swept through her. She had looked forward to
the English country life; she had meant to play a great part in it. But
three months had been enough to show her the kind of thing--the hopeless
narrowness and Philistinism of these English back-waters. What did these
small squires and country clergy know of the real world, the world that
mattered to _her_, where people had free minds and progressive ideas?
Her resentment of the _milieu_ in which Roger expected her to live
subtly swelled and strengthened her wrath against himself; it made the
soil from which sprang a sudden growth of angry will--violent and
destructive. There was in her little or none of that affinity with a
traditional, a parent England, which is present in so many Americans,
which emerges in them like buried land from the waters. On the contrary,
the pressure of race and blood in her was not towards, but against; not
friendly, but hostile. The nearer she came to the English life, the more
certain forces in her, deeply infused, rose up and made their protest.
The Celtic and Latin strains that were mingled in her, their natural
sympathies and repulsions, which had been indistinct in the girl,
overlaid by the deposits of the current American world, were becoming
dominant in the woman.

* * * * *

Well, thank goodness, modern life is not as the old! There are ways out.

Midnight had just struck. The night was gusty, the north-west wind made
fierce attacks on the square, comfortable house. Daphne rose slowly; she
moved noiselessly across the floor; she stood with her arms behind her
looking down at the sleeping Roger. Then a thought struck her; she
reached out a hand to the new number of an American Quarterly which lay,
with the paper knife in it, on a table bes