A few yards away, a wakeful Marjorie confronted a joyless universe. She
had a baffling realization that her life was in a hopeless mess, that
she really had behaved disgracefully, and that she couldn't for a moment
understand how it had happened. She had intended to make quite sure of
Trafford--and then put things straight.
Only her father had spoilt everything.
She regarded her father that night with a want of natural affection
terrible to record. Why had he come just when he had, just as he had?
Why had he been so violent, so impossible?
Of course, she had no business to be there....
She examined her character with a new unprecedented detachment. Wasn't
she, after all, rather a mean human being? It had never occurred to her
before to ask such a question. Now she asked it with only too clear a
sense of the answer. She tried to trace how these multiplying threads of
meanness had first come into the fabric of a life she had supposed
herself to be weaving in extremely bright, honourable, and adventurous
colours. She ought, of course, never to have accepted Magnet....
She faced the disagreeable word; was she a liar?
At any rate, she told lies.
And she'd behaved with extraordinary meanness to Daphne. She realized
that now. She had known, as precisely as if she had been told, how
Daphne felt about Trafford, and she'd never given her an inkling of her
own relations. She hadn't for a moment thought of Daphne. No wonder
Daffy was sombre and bitter. Whatever she knew, she knew enough. She had
heard Trafford's name in urgent whispers on the landing. "I suppose you
couldn't leave him alone," Daffy had said, after a long hostile silence.
That was all. Just a sentence without prelude or answer flung across the
bedroom, revealing a perfect understanding--deeps of angry
disillusionment. Marjorie had stared and gasped, and made no answer.
Would she ever see him again? After this horror of rowdy intervention?
She didn't deserve to; she didn't deserve anything.... Oh, the tangle of
it all! The tangle of it all! And those bills at Oxbridge! She was just
dragging Trafford down into her own miserable morass of a life.
Her thoughts would take a new turn. "I love him," she whispered
soundlessly. "I would die for him. I would like to lie under his
feet--and him not know it."
Her mind hung on that for a long time. "Not know it until afterwards,"
she corrected.
She liked to be exact, even in despair....
And then in her memory he was struck again, and stood stiff and still.
She wanted to kneel to him, imagined herself kneeling....
And so on, quite inconclusively, round and round through the
interminable night hours.