Her attitude towards him had not been
passive; she had loved him. She had owed him love and she had paid her
debt; she had paid enough, yet if to-day he asked for more, she would
give it. Her pride hoped for that demand; her weariness shrank from
it.
And he had kissed Henrietta. The sharpness of that thought, on which
from the first moment on the stairs she had refused to dwell, steeling
her mind against it with a determination which perhaps accounted for
her fatigue, was like a physical pain running through her whole body,
so that the horse, feeling an unaccustomed jerk on his mouth, became
alarmed and restive. She steadied him and herself. A kiss was nothing
--yet she had always denied it to Francis Sales. She could not blame
him, for she saw how her own fastidiousness had endangered his. He
needed material evidence of love. She ought, she supposed, to have
sacrificed her scruples for his sake; mentally she had already done
it, and the physical refusal was perhaps no more than pride which
salved her conscience and might ruin his, but it existed firmly like a
fortress. She could not surrender it. Her love was not great enough
for that; or was it, she asked herself, too great? She could not
comfort herself with that illusion, and there came creeping the
thought that for some one else, some one too strong to need such a
capitulation, she would have given it gladly, but against Francis, who
was intrinsically weak, she had held out.
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