"I--I didn't wish to," I said, and burst into tears.
And now I am wondering what is going to happen, what everyone will say
and do, particularly Cheneston and mother.
I wish I could find a corner of the earth now to crouch in, and I want
it to be dark and utterly silent, so that I may think and find out where
I stand.
*VII*
Sometimes I wonder what humans are fitted with imaginations for; they
are a great nuisance and utterly unreliable. I was fitted with a
high-power imagination--it overbalances me sometimes, swings me down to
misery and nearer to the face of ecstasy than I was ever meant to go. I
spent a sleepless night wondering what would happen after my confession
that I had heard from the renegade Captain Markham, and my inexplicable
tears; by the time I rose I had all the results planned out, beginning
with the interview with Cheneston, in which I implied my love for Walter
Markham, and ending in a sort of grand finale scene with mother, in
which elegance and reproaches and jasmine scent mingled, and my clothes,
all I had cost, and my obvious lack of chic and charm were hurled at my
head.
None of these things happened.
Grace Gilpin and her mother drove by in the high dog-cart as I was
taking Pomp and Circumstance for their morning run; they stopped and
chatted, but neither of them referred to Walter Markham, or Cheneston,
or the little scene I had enacted in their drawing-room the previous
night.