banished her without trial? She
had never been heard in her own defence; she was innocent of the charge
on which she had been found guilty; and the irregularity of her
conviction might seem to justify the use of methods as irregular in
recovering her lost rights. Bertha Dorset, to save herself, had not
scrupled to ruin her by an open falsehood; why should she hesitate to
make private use of the facts that chance had put in her way? After all,
half the opprobrium of such an act lies in the name attached to it. Call
it blackmail and it becomes unthinkable; but explain that it injures no
one, and that the rights regained by it were unjustly forfeited, and he
must be a formalist indeed who can find no plea in its defence.

The arguments pleading for it with Lily were the old unanswerable ones of
the personal situation: the sense of injury, the sense of failure, the
passionate craving for a fair chance against the selfish despotism of
society. She had learned by experience that she had neither the aptitude
nor the moral constancy to remake her life on new lines; to become a
worker among workers, and let the world of luxury and pleasure sweep by
her unregarded. She could not hold herself much to blame for this
ineffectiveness, and she was perhaps less to blame than she believed.
Inherited tendencies had combined with early training to make her the
highly specialized product she was: an organism as helpless out of its
narrow range as the sea-anemone torn from the rock. She had been
fashioned to adorn and delight; to what other end does nature round the
rose-leaf and paint the humming-bird's breast? And was it her fault that
the purely decorative mission is less easily and harmoniously fulfilled
among social beings than in the world of nature? That it is apt to be
hampered by material necessities or complicated by moral scruples?

These last were the two antagonistic forces which fought out their battle
in her breast during the long watches of the night; and when she rose the
next morning she hardly knew where the victory lay. She was exhausted by
the reaction of a night without sleep, coming after many nights of rest
artificially obtained; and in the distorting light of fatigue the future
stretched out before her grey, interminable and desolate.

She lay late in bed, refusing the coffee and fried eggs which the
friendly Irish servant thrust through her door, and hating the intimate
domestic noises of the house and the cri