'We can win through, Charles. We have Verschoyle backing us. I accept
my responsibility, and I will be a wife to you.'
'For God's sake, don't talk like that. I want you to be as you were,
adorable, happy, free.'
She shook her head slowly from side to side.
Charles, offended, went out. She heard him go blundering down the
stairs and out into the street.
She turned to her couch by the window and lay looking at the sun
setting behind the roofs, chimneys, and towers of London. Amethyst and
ruddy was the sky: smoked yellow and amber: blue and green, speckled
with little dark clouds. She drank in its beauty, and lost herself in
the dying day, aching at heart because there was nowhere in humanity a
beauty of equal power in which she could lose herself, but everywhere
barriers of egoism, intrigue, selfish calculation.... She thought of
the little bookseller in the Charing Cross Road.... 'Doing good to
others is doing good to yourself....' Ay, but make very sure that you
are doing good and not well-intentioned harm.
She had meant to help Charles, had sacrificed herself to him, and look
what had come of it! Deep within her heart she knew that she had been
at fault, and that the mischief had been done when she had imposed her
will on him.... As a child she had been brought up in the Catholic
faith, and she had still some remnants of a religious conscience, and
to this now she whispered that this was the sin against the Holy Ghost,
for one person to impose his will on that of another.